AustLit

'Since his death in 1922, Henry Lawson’s “spirit” has been kept alive by admirers across Australia. Over the last century, Lawson’s reputation in the academy has fluctuated yet fan support remains robust partly due to the efforts of Lawson societies in Victoria and New South Wales. Support for Lawson remains high in rural communities such as Grenfell and Gulgong in New South Wales which celebrate Lawson’s residence through annual festivals. Although cities have largely rejected the nationalistic cultural heritage that Lawson is seen to represent, the Melbourne-based Henry Lawson Literary and Memorial Society has worked tirelessly to maintain Lawson’s profile and disseminate his writing to the wider community. Through interviews with six members of the HLLM Society and participant observation at their meetings, I consider the ways in which members translate their passion for Lawson into a constellation of activities. Lawson fan practices tend to be celebratory and largely uncritical, an approach which is at odds with academic scholarship that encourages “suspicious” reading (Felski, “Context Stinks!”). Literary theory and criticism, Rita Felski argues, are orientated around a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that promotes a sensibility that prides itself on wariness and hyper-vigilence (Felski, “After Suspicion” 29). The traditional literary critic behaves like a detective, establishing connections and eventually finding a culprit. Instead of reading Lawson’s work suspiciously, HLLM Society members show enormous reverence for it, demonstrating some of the affective pleasures of literature in a social context. ' (Introduction)