What Readers Do: Aesthetic and Moral Practices of a Post-Digital Age

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Description

Shining the spotlight on everyday readers of the 21st century, Beth Driscoll explores how contemporary readers of Anglophone fiction interact with consumer publishing and the book industry. The product of 16 years of qualitative research into readers and reading culture, this book examines reading through three dimensions - aesthetic conduct, moral conduct, and self-care to probe at how readers intertwine private and social behaviors, and both reinforce and oppose the structures of capitalism. Analyzing reading as a post-digital practice that is a synthesis of both print and digital modes and on-and offline behaviors, Driscoll presents a methodology for studying readers that connects sociology, book history, literary studies and actor-network theory. Also working to advance earlier studies that focused on readers face-to-face practices, What Readers Do digs into book clubs, reader involvement with broadcast media, such as via Oprahs Book Club, and posting pictures of books on social media.

Author Bio

Beth Driscoll is Associate Professor of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her publications to date have engaged closely with contemporary book culture, including The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and over 20 book chapters and journal articles in venues including Post45, Textual Practice and Angelaki. Globally networked, she has worked on multiple collaborative research projects, the outcomes of which include two co-authored books: The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business (with Claire Squires, 2020), and Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First Century Book Culture (with Kim Wilkins and Lisa Fletcher, 2022). She has also written about readers specifically in book chapters and articles, such as Readers of Popular Fiction and Emotion (New Direction in Popular Fiction, 2016), Book Blogs as Tastemakers (Particip@tions, 2016) and Faraway so Close: Seeing the Intimacy in Goodreads Reviews (with DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Qualitative Inquiry 2019).