Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

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.

Cognitive effects and correlates of reading fiction: Two preregistered multilevel meta-analyses.

“…We regularly encounter written fiction in our everyday lives. Increasing rates of reading fiction during the Covid-19 pandemic (Anuar et al, 2021; Cho et al, 2021; Davies et al, 2022) illustrate the important role that fiction plays in humans’ lives, even though attitudes toward reading (as indexed by how much students and their parents report liking reading) have become more negative internationally over the preceding decades (Hooper, 2020). While reading fiction is indisputably a popular activity, its psychological effects are debated (e.g., Best, 2021).…”

Organization and the arts: Critical conversations on expanding meanings and understandings of who matters

“…While this study focused on intellectual writers in workplaces, another avenue here worth noting is that what people read outside workplaces matters for their work lives, and vice versa. Ethnographies in this respect, such as a recent one of novel readers in the UK and Denmark during the pandemic (Davies et al, 2022), can be a means of discovering this particular intersection between work lives and literary arts through what may be called workplace literary sociology.…”

Narrating Loneliness: Isolation, Disaffection, and the Contemporary Novel

“…9 For some figures, see Flood (2020). 10 For an ethnographic study about the ways novel reading changed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark and the UK and the ways it emotionally impacted readers, see Davies, Lupton, and Gormsen Schmidt (2022). On reading as a social and relational activity, see Fuller and Rehberg Sedo (2013) and Birke (2021).…”