Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic is an expansive, theoretically suggestive, and very engaging exploration of literature during an unprecedented global crisis. It presents multifaceted perspectives on the complexity of finding time for reading amid a global crisis. Above all, the volume contributes significantly to the fields of literary sociology and ethnography as well as criticism.

Auteur

Ben Davies is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction (2016); editor of John Burnside: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2020); and co-editor of Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011). He has also published articles in journals such as Textual Practice and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.

Christina Lupton is a professor at the University of Warwick and the University of Copenhagen. She is author of three monographs: Knowing Books (2012), Reading and the Making of Time (2018), and Love and the Novel: Life After Reading (2022), and numerous articles on the topics of reading, time use, and the materiality of books.

Johanne Gormsen Schmidt holds a PhD in literature from University of Southern Denmark and is currently a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of several pieces in the fields of literary sociology, comparative and Scandinavian literature, and uses of literature. She is editor of the literary journal Passage.

Texte du rabat

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 - showing what novels people turned to during the pandemic, how people experienced time during this period, and whether they chose to fill it with reading.