This article draws on evidence from a qualitative study of working-class readers in order to reflect on the ways in which readers can lay claim to, or can affirm a particular kind of meaningful relationship with, poetic texts. Drawing a lesson from the example of Bridget Fowler’s account of the reading of popular romances, it argues for the need to take seriously the question of the ‘uses’ of literary and cultural products. An account which construes the relationship between readers and literary texts only in terms of the accumulation of cultural capital within the context of a wider symbolic economy risks losing sight of the ways in which popular practices of using and sharing poems can be discordant with both the rationality of symbolic exchange and the wider rationalities which are characteristic of capitalism.

中文翻译：

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 诗歌的用途


本文借鉴了对工人阶级读者的定性研究的证据，以反思读者可以主张或肯定与诗歌文本建立某种特定类型的有意义关系的方式。它以布里奇特·福勒 （Bridget Fowler） 对通俗浪漫小说阅读的描述为例，认为需要认真对待文学和文化产品的“用途”问题。如果仅仅从更广泛的象征经济背景下的文化资本积累的角度来解释读者和文学文本之间的关系，那么就有可能忽视使用和分享诗歌的流行做法可能与象征换的合理性和资本主义特征的更广泛的合理性不一致。