Title Reading novels during the COVID-19 pandemic / Ben Davies, Christina Lupton, and Johanne Gormsen Schmidt

Edition First edition Published Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2022 ©2022

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Description 1 online resource Contents The Readers -- Introduction -- The Project Begins -- Theoretical Coordinates -- The Reading Wars -- 1. Time and What to Do in It -- Passing Time -- Carving Out Time for Oneself -- Controlling Time -- Keeping Track of Time -- 2. Plague Literature and the Question of Allegory -- Reading Literally -- Reading Allegorically -- The Slippery Time of Allegory -- 3. The Novel of Confinement -- Writing Confinement -- The Reader's Slowness -- The Linearity of Narrative -- 4. Old Books in New Times -- The Perspective of Old Books -- Reading Classics Together -- Through the Prism of the Pandemic -- Reading Classics Again -- 5. Reading Outdoors -- The Disturbed Nature of 2020 -- Getting Out while Locked Down -- Private Gardens and Shared Reading Experiences -- 6. Reading Summer in Summer 2020 -- Summer Reading -- Reading Summer -- Reading Frames -- 7. Reading the Romance -- Love in a Time of Covid -- For the Love of Fiction -- 8. Reading about Race -- Expanding Horizons -- What if Reading Changes Nothing? -- The Difference Words Make -- 9. Long Reads -- The Morality of the Long Read -- Lengthy Listening -- Sense of an Ending -- Coda: Endings -- Appendix: The Surveys -- Bibliography -- Index Summary Drawing on a study of novel readers in Denmark and the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, this book provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history. The ethnographic approach shows what no account of books published during the pandemic will be able to capture, namely the movement of readers between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. The book follows readers who have tuned into novels about plague, apocalypse, and racial violence, but also readers whose taste for older novels has grown. Alternating between chapters that analyse single texts that were popular (Camus's The Plague, Ali Smith's Summer, Brontë's Jane Eyre) and others that describe clusters of, for example, dystopian fiction and nature writing, this work brings out the diverse quality of the Covid-19 bookshelf. Time is important to this study, both in terms of the time of lockdown and the temporality of reading itself within this wider disrupted sense of time. By exploring these varied experiences, this book investigates the larger question of how the consumption of novels depends on and shapes people's experience of non-work time, providing a specific lens through which to examine the phenomenology of reading more generally. This work also negotiates debates in the study of reading that distinguish theoretically between critical reading and reading for pleasure, between professional and lay reading. All sides of the sociological and literary debate must be brought to bear in understanding what readers tell us about the novels important to them in this complex historical moment Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from home page (Oxford Academic, viewed November 16, 2023) Subject Books and reading -- Great Britain -- History -- 21st century Books and reading -- Denmark -- History -- 21st century COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- -- Social aspects -- Denmark COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- -- Social aspects -- Great Britain Books and reading Social aspects Library & information sciences / Museology. Libraries and Museums. Denmark Great Britain Genre/Form Novels History Novels Novels. Romans. Form Electronic book Author Lupton, Christina, author. Schmidt, Johanne Gormsen, author. ISBN 9780192672162 0192672169 9780191948558 0191948551 9780192672179 0192672177

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