Abstract:
This paper will explore the forms of explanation that fiction readers claim are brought forth or drawn out of them by questions about the politics of their favourite author: the twentieth century writer Henry Williamson. As members of an English literary society devoted to the promotion of Williamson's works, readers struggle with the knowledge or discovery that the author was a fascist, a friend of Oswald Mosley and participant in the British Union of Fascists during the 1930s. Indeed, they observe that one of the artefacts of literary society is precisely the compulsion to explain or to become certain kinds of explaining subjects. Engaging with wider literature on the methodology of explanation and the assumed nature of anthropological explanation, this paper seeks to provide a description of how explanation emerges and is experienced by those held responsible for making it.