Inteational Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity (Elements in Publishing and Book Culture)

by: Rachel Noorda (Author),Millicent Weber(Author),Melanie Ramdarshan Bold(Author)&0more

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Publication Date: 23 May 2024

Language: English

Print Length: 78 pages

ISBN-10: 1009108484

ISBN-13: 9781009108485

Book Description

Inteational bestsellers are the ideal sites for examining the complicated relationship between literary culture and national identity. Despite the transnational tus in both literary studies and book history, place is still an important configurer of twenty-first-century book reception. Books are crucial to national identity and catalysts of nationalist movements. On an individual level, books enable readers to shape and maintain their own national identities. This Element explores how contemporary readers' understandings of nation, race/ethnicity, gender, and class continue to shape their reading, using as case studies the online reception of three bestseller titles-Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies (Australia), Zadie Smith's NW (UK), and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians (USA). In doing so, this Element demonstrates the need for and articulates a transnational conceptualisation of the relationship between reader identity and reception.
Inteational bestsellers are the ideal sites for examining the complicated relationship between literary culture and national identity. Despite the transnational tus in both literary studies and book history, place is still an important configurer of twenty-first-century book reception. Books are crucial to national identity and catalysts of nationalist movements. On an individual level, books enable readers to shape and maintain their own national identities. This Element explores how contemporary readers' understandings of nation, race/ethnicity, gender, and class continue to shape their reading, using as case studies the online reception of three bestseller titles-Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies (Australia), Zadie Smith's NW (UK), and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians (USA). In doing so, this Element demonstrates the need for and articulates a transnational conceptualisation of the relationship between reader identity and reception.