The Tradëscan Codex

Hmm, yes, you have made this argument persuasively before. And now I'm wondering about other reading/writing groups like the ones you mentioned. But even so...you don't have to be writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or Wide Sargasso Sea or March to have one's literature operating on the assumption that the reader has various levels of knowledge over and above knowing English and posessing some basic cultural literacy. Where would Eliot or Pound fit in? (Although that brings us back to the question of whether and how something can/should be read outside of its context, as Eliot and Pound wrote more or less knowing that few if any of their readers would have the necessary context to understand the work.)

I suppose I'm left wondering, firstly, whether we are dealing with a difference in kind or only of degree, and secondly whether there are enough similarly-constructed communities (religious novels?) to challenge assumptions about fandom?