Bookshelves In The Age Of The Covid 19 Pandemic

Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic provides the first detailed scholarly investigation of the cultural phenomenon of bookshelves (and the social practices around them) since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. With a foreword by Lydia Pyne, author of Bookshelf (2016), the volume brings together 17 scholars from 6 countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA) with expertise in literary studies, book history, publishing, visual arts, and pedagogy to critically examine the role of bookshelves during the current pandemic. This volume interrogates the complex relationship between the physical book and its digital manifestation via online platforms, a relationship brought to widespread public and scholarly attention by the global shift to working from home and the rise of online pedagogy. It also goes beyond the (digital) bookshelf to consider bookselling, book accessibility, and pandemic reading habits.

This book analyses how growing managerialism and the marketisation of higher education has undermined educational standards and pedagogical integrity. Specifically, it provides a thorough critique of how the pandemic, and the move to online learning and MOOCs, has reinforced these developments. The book outlines the limits of new managerialism, which is replacing critical mass with a culture of compliance in higher education. Employing an ethnographic approach, the book explores the impact of the sudden shift in teaching delivery from in-person to online for example, the changing role of the PhD supervisor during the pandemic, and the impact on students’ willingness to engage and their (in)visibility in the classroom, and further considers how these impact class interactions, social relationships and learning. Ultimately, this book argues that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limits of marketisation of education and revealed the distorted managerial response to a crisis.

The famous 1962 precedent at the Restrictive Practices Court of the United Kingdom, 'Books are different,' is still the reasoning behind many cultural policies around the world, building on longstanding assumptions surrounding 'the book'. As this suggests, the 'difference' of the book as a unique form of cultural (rather than economic) production has acquired a powerful status. But are books still different? In (somewhat provocatively) asking this question from a network-oriented and interdisciplinary perspective (book studies/literary studies), this Element inquires into the notion of 'difference' in relation to books. Challenging common notions of 'bibliodiversity,' it reconsiders the lack of diversity in the publishing industry. It also engages with the diversifying potentials of the digital literary sphere, offering a case study of Bernardine Evaristo's industry activities and activism, the Element concludes with thoughts on bookishness, affect and networked practice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Shining a spotlight on everyday readers of the 21st century, Beth Driscoll explores how contemporary readers of Anglophone fiction interact with the book industry, digital environments, and each other. We live in an era when book clubs, bibliomemoirs, Bookstagram and BookTok are as valuable to some readers as solitary reading moments. The product of nearly two decades of qualitative research into readers and reading culture, What Readers Do examines reading through three dimensions - aesthetic conduct, moral conduct, and self-care – to show 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 book history, literary studies, sociology, and actor-network theory. Arguing for the vitality, agency, and creativity of readers, this book sheds light on how we read now - and on how much more readers do than just read.

Literary works play a crucial role in modelling and conceptualising temporalities. This becomes particularly apparent in times of crises, which put conventionalised temporal patterns and routines under pressure. During crises, past, present, and future appear to collapse into each other and give way to temporal disjunction and rupture. Offering pluralised and context-sensitive approaches to temporalities in and of crises, this volume explores how literature’s engagement with crises suggests both the need for and possibility of rethinking ‘time’. The volume is committed to examining the affordances of specific genres and their potential in pointing beyond temporalities of crises to facilitate a sense of futurity. Individual essays are grounded in recent theories of temporality and literary form, which are related to novel advancements in ecocriticism, queer studies, affect theory, and postcolonial studies. The chapters cover a broad range of examples from different literary genres to reveal the knowledge of literature about temporalities in and of crises.

Readers are essential agents in the production of bestsellers but bestsellers are not essential to readers' leisure pursuits. The starting point in this Element is readers' opinions about and their uses of bestselling fiction in English. Readers' relationships with bestsellers bring into view their practices of book selection, and their navigation of book recommendation culture. Based on three years of original research (2019–2021), including a quantitative survey with readers, interviews with social media influencers, and qualitative work with international Gen Z readers in a private Instagram chat space, the authors highlight three core actions contemporary multimodal readers make– choosing, connecting, and responding– in a transmedia era where on- and offline media practices co-exist. The contemporary multimodal reader, or the MMR3, they argue, illustrates the pervasiveness of recommendation culture, reliance on trusted others, and an ethic of responsiveness.

When violence breaks out at the stands of far-right publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Beatrice Deft is provoked into action. An alienated Australian high school teacher who finds herself at the centre of the global book industry, Beatrice encounters a cast of characters including the very hot Caspian Schorle (German police officer), Kurt Weidenfeld (left-wing German publisher), and White Storm (a neo-Nazi publishing organisation). Such is the premise of The Frankfurt Kabuff, a comic erotic thriller about the publishing industry originally self-published under the pseudonym Blaire Squiscoll. With The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition, Blaire Squiscoll is revealed as the pen name of Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires, who created the novella in the midst of fieldwork at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Published for the first time as a full critical edition, this experimental, playful work combines critical and creative modes for new perspectives on the publishing industry and creative economies. The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition enriches the novella with an introduction, annotated text, 15 essays by leading scholars and practitioners, and additional creative assemblages. This highly unusual research project offers insights for students, academics and publishers alike.

Drawing on an ethnographic 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 historical 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, and for re-reading novels they knew earlier in their lives, has grown. Alternating between chapters that analyse single texts that were popular (Albert Camus's The Plague, Ali Smith's Summer, Charlotte Brönte'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 of central importance 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 timely 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 what novels have meant to them in this complex historical moment.