Abstract
One of the striking features of popular fiction is that at least part of its readership can be identified as fans: deeply knowledgeable and passionately engaged with a book, author or genre, and active participants in the non-academic reception of these cultural products. In his book Popular Fiction: Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, Ken Gelder writes that popular fiction ‘often enjoys a particular kind of reader loyalty, one that can build itself around not just a writer and his or her body of work (which certainly happens) but the entire genre and the culture that imbues it. In other words, popular fiction has fans’ (2004, p. 81). Fan studies have historically recognized ‘textual productivity’ (Fiske 1992)—the creation of zines, newsletters, websites and so on—as a hallmark of engagement; more recently, the opportunities for such activity have been multiplied by the interactive digital spaces of Web 2.0 (Booth 2010; Hills 2013; Jenkins et al. 2013). Review sections on Goodreads and Amazon, book clubs on Twitter, networks of book blogs and comment threads on news articles all provide spaces where readers can write responses to popular fiction. This chapter begins with the position that a reader who creates a textual response to a book, author or genre is a fan, while remaining interested in the way in which different kinds of textual responses can reflect varying levels of investment.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Best, S., & Marcus, S. (2009). Surface reading: An introduction. Representations, 108(1), 1–21.
Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The sociology of critical capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359–377.
Booth, P. (2010). Digital fandom: New media studies. New York: Peter Lang.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature (R. Johnson, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1996). The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field (S. Emanuel, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2007 [1986]). The forms of capital. In A. R. Sadovnic (Ed.), The sociology of education. New York: Routledge.
Ceilidh. (2014, October 18). An open letter to Kathleen Hale and Guardian books: Stalking is not okay. Bibliodaze. http://bibliodaze.com/2014/10/an-open-letter-to-kathleen-hale-guardian-books-stalking-is-not-okay/
Driscoll, B. (2014). The new literary middlebrow: Tastemakers and reading in the twenty-first century. London: Palgrave.
Driscoll, B. (2015). Sentiment analysis and the literary festival audience. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 29(6), 861–873.
Dromi, S. M., & Illouz, E. (2010). Recovering morality: Pragmatic sociology and literary studies. New Literary History, 41(2), 351–369.
Evans, A., & Stasi, M. (2014). Desperately seeking methodology: New directions in fan studies research. Participations, 11(2), 4–23.
Feldman Barrett, L. (2006). Valence is a basic building block of emotional life. Journal of Research into Personality, 40(1), 35–55.
Fiske, J. (1992). The cultural economy of fandom. In L. Lewis (Ed.), The adoring audience: Fan culture and popular media. London: Routledge.
Franssen, T., & Kuipers, G. (2015). Sociology of literature and publishing in the early 21st century: Away from the centre. Cultural Sociology, 9(3), 291–295.
Frow, J. (2014). Genre. London/New York: Routledge.
Fuller, D., & Rehberg Sedo, D. (2013). Reading beyond the book: The social practices of contemporary literary culture. London/New York: Routledge.
Gelder, K. (2004). Popular fiction: The logics and practices of a literary field. London/New York: Routledge.
Gruzd, A. and Rehberg Sedo, D. (2012). #1b1t: Investigating reading practices at the turn of the twenty-first century. Memoires du Livre/Studies in Book Culture, 3(2). http://www.erudit.org/revue/memoires/2012/v3/n2/1009347ar.html
Hale, K. (2013). No one else can have you. New York: HarperCollins.
Hale, K. (2014, October 18). Am i being catfished? An author confronts her number one critic. Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/18/am-i-being-catfished-an-author-confronts-her-number-one-online-critic
Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Love, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Hills, M. (2013). Fiske’s ‘textual productivity’ and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction? Participations, 10(1). http://participations.org/Volume%2010/Issue%201/9%20Hills%2010.1.pdf
Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York/London: New York University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lexalytics. (2015). Sentiment analysis. http://www.lexalytics.com/technical-info/sentiment-analysis
Litte, J. (2014, October 19). On the importance of pseudonymous activity. Dear author. http://dearauthor.com/features/essays/on-the-importance-of-pseudonymous-activity/
Long, E. (2003). Book clubs: Women and the uses of reading in everyday life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Love, H. (2010). Close but not deep: Literary ethics and the descriptive turn. New Literary History, 41(2), 371–391.
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for literary theory. London: Verso.
Mozes, S. (2010, November 12). James Frey’s fiction factory. New York. http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/index1.html
Nakamura, L. (2013). Words with friends: Socially networked reading on Goodreads. PMLA, 128(1), 238–243.
Pang, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, 2(1–2), 1–135.
Radway, J. (1997). A feeling for books: The book-of-the-month club, literary taste, and middle-class desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Ray Murray, P., & Squires, C. (2013). The digital publishing communications circuit. Book 2.0, 3(1), 3–24.
Susen, S. (2014). Towards a dialogue between Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’ and Luc Boltanski’s ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’. In S. Susen & B. Turner (Eds.), The spirit of Luc Boltanski. London/New York: Anthem Press.
Thelwall, M., Wilkinson, D., & Uppal, S. (2010). Data mining emotion in social network communication: Gender differences in MySpace. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(1), 190–199.
Wendall, S. (2014, October 18). The choices of Kathleen Hale. In Smart bitches, trashy books. http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2014/10/the-choices-of-kathleen-hale/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Driscoll, B. (2016). Readers of Popular Fiction and Emotion Online. In: Gelder, K. (eds) New Directions in Popular Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52346-4_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52346-4_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-52345-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52346-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)