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.
Vi har aldrig vaeret moderne, haevder Bruno Latour i titlen på et af sine tidlige vaerker (1991) og mener dermed, at den moderne adskillelse af natur og kultur, objekt og subjekt, fakta og fiktion ikke holder i laengden. Den adskillelse, som har vaeret forudsaetningen for de videnskabelige gennembrud og teknologiske landvindinger, der kendetegner nyere tid, fører nemlig en masse blandingsformer med sig, som det moderne samfund ikke vil vide af, men som ikke desto mindre gør sig gaeldende med stigende kraft. Et efterhånden anerkendt eksempel på en sådan anmassende blandingsform er, når vi som samfund tager en politisk beslutning, og det viser sig også at have konsekvenser for Jorden og klimaet. Det sociale og det materielle er i dette tilfaelde vaevet sammen trods den adskillelse, som videnskaben staedigt opererer ud fra. Vi har aldrig vaeret moderne har siden opnået status af nyklassiker, alt imens videnskaben-og med den fundamentet for den moderne vestlige civilisation-er røget ind i en alvorlig legitimitetskrise. I dag mødes videnskabeligt baserede ekspertudtalelser med en mistro, der gør det tiltagende 1 Denne artikel er udarbejdet med økonomisk støtte fra Danmarks Grundforskningsfond (dnRF127). Johanne goRmsen schmidt Ph.d.-stipendiat i litteratur Centre for Uses of Literature, Syddansk Universitet
Chapter 5 explores the tension between reading indoors during lockdown and readers wanting to get outside. While many works published during the early days of the pandemic showed a nature disturbed and disrupted, our readers, we find, turned to older renditions of nature as a source of comfort. These fictions had a direct impact on what people did, motivating them to walk or visit rural landscapes they had read about, or to spend time in their gardens. The connection between being outside and reading a book about nature suggests just one of the more intricate relationships between language and action that readers have negotiated in the space and time of the pandemic. While some read to travel, others travelled and read at the same time, or followed up their fiction reading with real travel, but in all cases, books appear here as coordinates to our lives as well as our communities.
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