Abstract
This chapter builds on the theoretical and analytic work done in previous chapters to offer a model for the ways in which live and digital modes of engagement with literary culture intersect and enhance one another. It explores connections between the uptake of digital culture and literary festivals’ increasing popularity, and argues that both live and mediatised forms of contemporary engagement with literary culture sit within a tradition of reading as socially and materially constructed cultural practice. Building on the empirical audience data collected for this study, this chapter theorises and analyses the ways in which contemporary readers and writers interact in both live and digital environments, and how they negotiate engagement and develop communities across media boundaries.
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Notes
- 1.
Understanding contemporary literary engagement as part of a continuum, as well as part of a contested network, of mediatised and social practices also reinforces the connection between literary festivals and other oral and communal literary traditions, and acts as a reminder that print culture is not the only literary tradition.
- 2.
Lelia Green (‘Is it Meaningless to Talk About “the Internet”?’, 2008) offers a more detailed discussion of the trajectory of developments of internet usage and the increasing emphasis on user-generated content that was a product of Web 2.0.
- 3.
Notable, from 2013, Amazon owned Goodreads; as part of Amazon’s purchase of the second-hand online retailer AbeBooks, it also acquired up to 40% ownership of LibraryThing (AbeBooks 2006; Enis 2013; Price 2013). This agglomeration of commercial and community spaces is further evidence of the mutually beneficial relationship that exists between consumption and social practices.
- 4.
Compare, for example, the consistent focus of Robert Darnton’s 1986 article ‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading’ on both the social function and the socially constituted nature of historical reading practices.
- 5.
See also media coverage of the ‘Slow Reading Club’, a book group based in Wellington, New Zealand, which similarly advocates in heavily nostalgic tones ‘the focused reading habits of years gone by’ (Whalen 2014).
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Weber, M. (2018). Online and Onsite: Intersections in Embodied and Digital Engagement. In: Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71510-0_4
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