Published In
Elements in Publishing and Book Culture
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2024
Subjects
Group identity, Transnationalism, Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Book industries and trade, Publishers and publishing -- United States, Books -- Marketing, Consumer behavior, Book industry -- Digital humanities
Abstract
International bestsellers are the ideal sites for examining the complicated relationship between literary culture and national identity. Despite the transnational turns 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.
Rights
This is the author's manuscript version. The final version, © Cambridge University Press, is available from the publisher: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009104388
DOI
10.1017/9781009104388
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43616
Citation Details
Published as: Noorda, Rachel, Millicent Weber, and Melanie Ramdarshan Bold. International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity. Cambridge University Press, 2024.