Abstract

This work investigates the influences on the cultural identity of the Final Year literature
students at Institute of English Language and Literature, University of Sindh, Jamshoro
after reading Henry Fielding’s the History of Tom Jones. It is part of the subject Fiction
taught to them in their fourth year of the Bachelor Studies Degree Programme. Wolfgang
Iser’s Reader Response Theory is used as a theoretical framework to guide this study. The
findings are based on data supplied by 10 participants, who read Tom Jones as a part of
their fiction course through interviews. The key findings of this study suggested that the
semi-comic novel Tom Jones is not culturally close to the cultural context of the students
and majority of the participants averted to reading about the culture which is not related to
their own culture and their core cultural identity remained intact or quite minutely
influenced. The key findings also suggested that the process of reading is the process of
judgment and learning of the cultural values and morality.
This study is valuable for the curriculum developers of literature, teachers of literature, and
students of literature too at public universities who are exposed to different cultural habits
through the literary texts. The findings of this study are also valuable in terms of knowing
the students’ perceptions regarding their connection with text and connection of text with
their reality as these two are the specific components taken from Iser’s theory to guide this
study.

Key words: Culture, Context, Identity, Readers