Learning English in a postcolonial country involves much more than gaining the ability to speak and write in the language; students are also taught to appreciate the literary traditions of that language. This study analyzes data from one urban, Anglophone, and popular fiction-reading subculture, which is a rather unexpected cultural formation influenced by this medium. Participants in my research were educated in English-medium schools and drew out similarities between the textual representations of Regency-era England, especially in the novels of Jane Austen, and the prevailing structures of social and economic class in Pakistani society. The descriptions of early nineteenth-century patriarchal English society in literature resonate with women educated in prestigious English-medium Pakistani schools, creating a distinctive reading taste. This sets them apart from their peers educated in Urdu-medium schools. I contend that this reading taste is the academic legacy of reading Austen, which signifies the schism in national cultural capital produced by the two dominant mediums of education in the country: Urdu and English.
The findings in this chapter are based on focus-group discussions with female readers of Anglophone romances and extensive observation of the retail ecosystem for the selling of new and used books in the major urban centers of Pakistan.
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Responses to the romance genre, as Pakistani readers find it in the fictional world of Austen, provides a distinctive way to study the complexity of the cultural capital produced by the different mediums of education in a postcolonial society. The readers in my focus groups frequently claimed that Regency historical romances, to quote a reader, "resonate" with them more than Anglophone novels with contemporary settings because they depict a storyworld that is closer to their lived reality. The contemporary Regency romances are set in the period of English history between the year 1780 and 1830.
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