Social reading Configurations in eighteenth-century and contemporary literary cultures Dorothee Birke and Helga Schwalm In the last few decades, scholars have made great progress in the project of giving reading a history. Challenging questions regarding records, material contexts, locations, and methodologies have begun to be answered, 1 almost by necessity in a crossand multi-disciplinary fashion, and supported by the rise of the digital humanities (see, for example, the large-scale enterprise of the UK Reading Experience Database, launched at the Open University in 1996). In the wake of these scholarly activities, reading as practice has come to the fore, along with different reading constellations and configurations. Thus, whereas traditional approaches in literary studies were mainly interested in reading as a process of understanding or interpretation, 2 more recent scholarship in the field has taken a programmatic turn to look ‘outside’, locating reading instead in the dynamic “intersections among media developments, literary trends, and social practices” (Andersen et al. 2021: 131). This new scholarship has shed light on historical and contemporary readers - conceived of as real, embodied readers - as well as practices and institutions. It ranges from readers of manuscripts to readers of digital media, from scholarly/ studious to lay readers, from individual readers sitting in their closets to reading together at home, and reading communities of various kinds, last not least academic critical circles such as we engage in, which have recently been addressed under the auspices of disciplinary “praxeology” (see, e.g., Martus and Spoerhase 2022). Above all, reading practices, be they a private, interpersonal or institutional matter, point to the social dimension of reading: an integral part 1 These questions have been raised by Halsey and Owens (2011), citing Robert Darnton and others. 2 On approaches to reading, see Birke (2016: 8-10). AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0001 Dorothee Birke and Helga Schwalm 8 of the experience of reading is to set oneself, consciously or unconsciously, into relation with others. The digitalisation of the book market, with its fundamental impact on modes of production and reception, has brought new attention to the social dimensions of literary reading. What Murray has coined the “digital literary sphere” (Murray 2018) has afforded new ways of transforming reading into a communal activity, in many instances cutting across perceived divisions between writer and reader, professional and amateur. Not only do websites such as the enormously popular writing and reading platform Wattpad invite creative contributions from their readers by means of easy access, competitions, prizes, and so forth, they also actively address their audience as a potentially global reading (and writing) community. Indeed, media scholars like Henry Jenkins have long described the ‘new’ digitalised media environment as being marked by the rise of a “participatory culture” (2006: 3), where consumer and creator are no longer clearly distinguishable, and where content is created and modified in a continuous communal process. The recent rise of ‘bookish’ communities such as BookTube and BookTok (see Birke 2023; Reddan et al. 2024) is another example that would seem to be an especially obvious case in point: it seems to make intuitive sense that ‘social’ media is the realm where, for better or worse, even the reputedly solitary act of reading becomes a social phenomenon. But how solitary was reading in the past? If we look more closely at ‘social’ reading on BookTok and similar platforms, we see that its central aspects - exchange and discussion about reading, performance of reading culture as a way of self-fashioning, etc. - are not at all new. In this sense, reading has always been a social activity. While contemporary digital readers engage in social practices specific to new media, they also echo older forms of social reading, 3 and the past decades have also seen a resurgence of in-person reading groups (Andersen et al. 2021: 133). Books have been and continue to be “a means of social networking” (Nakamura 2013: 239- 240), if only through acts such as sharing one’s book lists digitally (such as on Goodreads) rather than through actual reading experiences. DeNel Rehberg Sedo’s seminal collection Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace (2011) has done formative work in mapping different “social formations” in which shared reading has materialised and developed over the course of the last three centuries. The impact of digital reading has, in some cases, inspired scholarship to (re)examine the ways in which reading has always been social - notably so, in Heather E. Blatt’s 2018 study of the ‘participatory culture’ of reading in late-medieval England. Another recent work that has contributed to historicizing social reading is Abigail Williams’s The Social Life of Books (2017), which intertwines forms of sociability in the eighteenth century 3 For an overview of different forms of collective reading constellations, see Schlicht (2018). Introduction 9 with different modes of reading and attention. Her book emphasises the extent to which the social dimension of reading is informed by socio-economic and material issues (‘access’) and tied to social practices. What has emerged from studies like Blatt’s and Williams’s is not only the ubiquity of social reading throughout literary history, but also the complexity of the concept itself - the question of what exactly constitutes ‘social reading’. Reading practices can be social “to quite different degrees of reciprocity and engagement,” and “their sociality is attached to diverse aspects of the complex practice of reading” (Birke 2021: 153). These include, for example, the communal perusal of a specific text, conversations about books (in private or public settings), as well as displaying one’s bookshelves to gain cultural capital. Indeed, the sociality of reading might even be detected in situations where no other people are materially present at all. One may argue, as Maria Angelica Thumala Olave does, that there is “no question that all reading is inherently social […], and even in solitude it involves social interaction, with authors, narrators, real or imagined readers, and the self” (2021: 102). In that sense, the solitary reading self is still a social self, imagining or mentally responding to others. In scenes of rereading, the other one encounters might be none other than the former self. By the same token, reading communities do not always have to be thought of as embodied or clearly located in space: Stanley Fish’s “interpretive community” (1980) or Peter Rabinowitz’s “authorial audience” (1977) suggest that processes of interpretation, just like textual production, should be understood as socially embedded. Studies of the novel have been and still are central to exploring the different ways in which reading operates as a social practice. Both the ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ of the genre of the novel, especially in its formative period in the eighteenth century, are strongly imbued with sociability tied to reading. Consider one of European literature’s most famous scenes of social reading from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Werther (1774): [Lotte] stand auf ihren Ellenbogen gestützt, ihr Blick durchdrang die Gegend; sie sah gen Himmel und auf mich, ich sah ihr Auge tränenvoll, sie legte ihre Hand auf die meinige und sagte: „Klopstock! “ - Ich erinnerte mich sogleich der herrlichen Ode, die ihr in Gedanken lag, und versank in dem Strome von Empfindungen, den sie in dieser Losung über mich ausgoß. Ich ertrug’s nicht, neigte mich auf ihre Hand und küßte sie unter den wonnevollsten Tränen […]! (Goethe [1774] 1998: 27) 4 4 “Charlotte leaned forward on her arm; her eyes wandered over the scene; she raised them to the sky, and then turned them upon me; they were moistened with tears; she placed her hand on mine and said, “Klopstock! ” at once I remembered the magnificent ode which was in her thoughts: I felt oppressed with the weight of my sensations, and sank under them. It was more than I could bear. I bent over her hand, kissed it in a stream of delicious tears […]” Gutenberg edition, translation R. Dillon Dorothee Birke and Helga Schwalm 10 Not only have Goethe’s Sturm und Drang lovers read the same poem, but they both love the same poem. They bond by way of “loving literature”, to cite Deidre Lynch’s catchy title (2014). Sentimental reading scenes, along with epistolary reading communities, frequently feature in eighteenth-century fiction. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is a case in point that countless critics have addressed. Such scenes tend to appear entwined with figurations of sympathy, i.e., with fellow-feeling. This is not just a question of ‘emplotting’ scenes of social reading but also of engendering practices of reading. Representations such as the one cited above display and forge “affective communities”, as Julika Griem (2021: 53) and others have pointed out. These affective communities range from Werther’s contemporary fans inspired by the novel’s pair of fictional readers to today’s global fan fiction, the latter well beyond the former confines of interpersonal or localised practices. 5 On a fundamental level, one might argue that sympathetic or empathetic bonding qua reading, such as Werther and Charlotte’s, constitutes a core mode of social reading. When sympathy is at work, intersubjective relations are always part of the reading process. In fact, the eighteenthcentury poetics of reading, as formulated by Samuel Johnson and Lord Kames (after all, no hardcore sentimentalists! ), identified sympathy as the key mechanism of reading and the guarantor of its social and moral benefits. The concept also played a significant role in the nineteenth-century aesthetics of realism. 6 In our millennium, sympathy and empathy once again play a key conceptual role in theories of reading fiction, as in the work of Suzanne Keen (2007), Howard Sklar (2013), and Lisa Zunshine (2006), or in sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s notion of reading as “Neuronenfeuer”. 7 Beyond the academic sphere, there has been an increase in the popularity and visibility of book clubs and bookish communities (see, e.g., Fuller & Rehberg-Sedo 2013), in which the networked “celebration of affect” (Murray 2018: 125) is regarded as one of the most important functions of reading. Bonding around books, in these communities, is to a large extent a matter of sharing affective responses. And yet, even though literary texts - and, arguably, the novel in particular - have long been invested in the intricacies of social reading, literary studies, as it has been practised throughout a large portion of the twentieth century, has preferred to work with abstract concepts of the reader, rather than giving serious attention to flesh-and-blood reading communities (or, Boylan, https: / / www.gutenberg.org/ cache/ epub/ 2527/ pg2527-images.html#link2 H_4_0002. 5 Clearly, as Ender and Lynch have observed in the introduction to a special issue in PMLA dedicated to reading, the “reemerging concept of world literature and new emphasis on traveling texts” has prompted “new questions about the location of literature” (2019: 10). 6 E.g., for George Eliot, see G. Levine (1981: 1); C. Levine (2013). 7 Rosa cited in Griem (2021: 10). Introduction 11 for that matter, to individual readers). While one might expect literary studies to be the central discipline that would further an understanding of the full range of reading practices, it has in fact long sought to sideline many of these, focusing on interpretation as a specialised type of reading to be performed by trained experts rather than your amateur ‘common’ reader. The New Critics’ legacy of ‘close reading’ has inspired generations of critics to prioritise the text and its complex structures; close reading equals fine interpretation, as it were. While post-structuralist critics explicitly turned against the New Critics and dismissed the notion of interpretation, their actual reading practices proved heavily indebted to their predecessors, replacing what might be called the earlier ‘reading for ambiguity and paradox’ with a kind of ‘reading towards dissemination’. In either case, close reading is precisely not about the actual responses or reactions of real readers (I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism is a slightly different matter). Even the Rezeptionsästhetik of the 1970s, which ostensibly put the reader at the centre, ultimately sought to elucidate the potential meanings (‘Sinnpotential’) of a text. Wolfgang Iser’s ‘implied reader’, in this theory, is an analytical construct describing a textual structure, constituted by “all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect - predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself” (Iser 1978: 34) [“Gesamtheit der Vororientierungen, die ein fiktionaler Text seinen Lesern als Rezeptionsbedingungen anbietet” (Iser 1994: 60)]. In the last few decades, an increased interest within literary studies in fields such as cognitive sciences, affect theory, sociology, book history, and the already mentioned digital humanities have brought new attention to reading as a material and social practice. *** Against a broad backdrop of critical concerns, this special issue explores the manifold social dimensions of reading as a contextualised social practice, embodied or conceptualised in and as different types of reading communities. The contributions spotlight constellations of social reading as both public and private matters, concerning the making of the self as well as the making of communities. The special focus lies on eighteenth-century and on contemporary literary cultures. Eighteenth-century readers and writers were acutely interested in exploring and interrogating the affective and ethical implications of reading; so are their counterparts in the digital literary sphere. The eighteenth century saw the rise and institutionalisation of many of the social literary formations that, justly or unjustly, are perceived as becoming obsolete or being transformed in radical ways in the twenty-first century. This includes the rise of professional literary criticism, of private reading circles, and the emergence of novels as social events. What is more, both periods feature fundamental transformations of the relation between media consumption and the public sphere. Dorothee Birke and Helga Schwalm 12 By juxtaposing literatures and literary cultures of the eighteenth century with those of our millennium, we thus highlight representations of social reading informed by and deeply intertwined with significant transformations of the public sphere. Notoriously, the eighteenth century saw the formation of the bourgeois public sphere (along with the evolution of new genres and media); with the ascent of the middle-class came new readers seeking representation. Whatever the many critical revisions of these standard tenets of cultural history since Habermas (1962), social reading played a crucial part. Not only did it operate as a practice linking individuals with their families or within other private circles, but it also served to connect the private and the public. Obviously, this is a broad field that cannot be mapped out fully in this introduction; suffice it to briefly point to three such practices located at different ends of the spectrum between private and public social reading. First, there is not only the formation of the novel as a genre that both facilitates and represents affective bonds between readers, but there is in particular the popularity of epistolary fictions in the eighteenth century. The latter thrive on sentimental scenarios of sociability, creating communities of reading both on the level of plot and among their implied and empirical readers. Again, Samuel Richardson’s novels are a prominent case in point. The nonfictional form of the diary, too, was often invested in the sociality of writing and circulatory reading. Second, social reading played a part among authors, in their quasi-professional practices. As Betty Schellenberg has shown, “manuscript-exchanging coteries” were “an integral and influential element of literary culture in eighteenth-century Britain” (2016: 3). Networking and mutual professional support operated in various literary coteries; at the heart of those interactions lay the mutual sharing, and thus reading, of manuscripts. Third, periodicals and magazines elicited social reading in various ways. Their prominent role in the public sphere was foregrounded - if not enhanced - by the inclusion of fictive letters to the editor, as in those addressed to ‘Mr Spectator’ in the eponymous periodical. Further into the century, as magazines strove to disseminate topical and general knowledge to their readership, they thrived on input from their readers - whether fictive or authentic - and displayed public social converse as part of the magazine design. Readers’ contributions, by way of letters to the editor on questions of general knowledge, or in question-and-answer features were a staple component of periodicals and magazines (see Schwalm 2023). That is to say, reading magazines involved reading (about) other readers. Thus, readers communicated and engaged with fellow readers. For the eighteenth century, a main difference between the three practices singled out here is the extent to which they are situated in predominantly private (as in the first case) or predominantly public (as in the third case) constellations. This differentiation has become increasingly blurred in our present age of social media, in which ‘private’ reading experiences Introduction 13 can be broadcast instantaneously and messages primarily directed at a small circle of friends or followers can go viral without any warning. Moreover, the sociality of reading and writing, sending and receiving, has become a central concern of literary and cultural representation, whether in novels that mimic contemporary forms of communication such as email or text messages (for instance, Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? , which is discussed in this special issue), or in other media such as TV series centring on specific communicative practices (Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why is just one example). What is more, variations of the ‘reading diary’ are currently among the most prominent video formats on ‘bookish’ social media platforms such as BookTube and BookTok, where readers invite others to share in and comment on everyday reading practices (see Birke 2023: 475). Whereas the eighteenth century saw an increasing development of the literary market and the rise of the book as a commodity, ‘bookish’ communities are not only holding on to the printed book as a commercial object, but also elevating it to the status of a “sacred relic” (Collins 2010: 224) or treating it as a fetish (Pressman 2020: 1). The fusion of social writing and social reading has arguably progressed further than at any other point in literary history. We have already mentioned the popular website Wattpad, which advertises itself as “the world’s largest storytelling community” and boasts of having “democratized storytelling for a new generation of diverse Gen Z writers and their fans” (Wattpad n.d.). In Jenkins’s formulation, “[r]ather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none us fully understand” (2006: 3). Conversely, looking to the coteries of the eighteenth century might prompt us to ask whether these roles were ever as separate as Jenkins here appears to believe. The third aspect of eighteenth-century literary culture mentioned above, the social reading elicited by magazine culture, could also be seen to prefigure Jenkins’ “participatory culture”. In turn, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish ‘private’ from ‘public’ interactions between readers. Are videos posted from one’s bedroom to a small number of followers still part of a private, or already of a public, sphere? What is the difference between engaging with fellow readers through letters to the editor in a magazine and posting on an internet forum, where others can directly respond and start new conversations about their own reading experiences? The development of new media constellations may not have fundamentally changed the sociality readers crave but it has given them new ways of doing what they have always liked to do: namely, to bond - but also, to compete or to fall out - over books. The contributions in this issue draw upon a wide range of materials for their inquiries into social reading practices. On the one hand, they attend to traces of the activities of real readers, from records of a small Scottish Dorothee Birke and Helga Schwalm 14 library at the end of the eighteenth century (Araya Acosta), to reading testimonies found on BookTube, the ‘bookish’ corner of the internet platform YouTube (Heinritz). On the other hand, they examine how novels themselves both represent and elicit social reading. One article discusses the different reading stances built into Samuel Richardson’s Pamela from 1740, explaining the book’s huge success through its appeal to different, even opposing types of audiences (Karschay). Another contribution mines Sally Rooney’s bestselling novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) for its “fictional enactments” of reading, which reflect on constellations of readership and authorship in the twenty-first century (Liedke). A third contribution on two contemporary novels considers fictional representations of reader relations in combination with material conditions of novel reading in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013). Both novels not only feature immersive reading practices in their content, but also elicit it through their form (Bauer). In all cases, reading emerges as an act of engaging with others within specific environments. Stephan Karschay’s take on Pamela is informed by Williams’s work on the role of reading in eighteenth-century sociability. He regards the novel not so much as a narrative processed by individual readers but as a shared cultural event that engenders conversation and controversy. In his reading, the epistolary form proves crucial in bridging the gap between solitary and shared reading; certainly, Pamela offers an “unrivalled mix of the sententious and the scandalous, the didactic and the entertaining”. As such, it lends itself particularly well to shared reading. Rebeca Araya Acosta’s contribution hones in on a rather different social constellation: a parish library in a mining community in southwestern Scotland. In her analysis of material of a type that has often been overlooked by literary scholars - namely, the founding committee’s minute book - Araya Acosta draws attention to the basic practices that facilitated and organised the community’s access to books. As an alternative to what she dubs the “Enlightenment master plot” of reading, she reconstructs how small institutions like this library organised themselves, and what material traces can (and cannot) tell us about the attention and care such communities gave to reading. Whereas Karschay’s and Araya Acosta’s articles give a sense of the eighteenth century as a time when material book culture - and, in particular novel reading - became an integral part of social exchange on a broad basis, the three articles on twenty-first-century reading constellations, consider the status of literary reading practices in a time when their place has (once again) become tenuous. That the printed book as an object has changed in significance is a central point in Gero Bauer’s article on fictional evocations of contemporary reading communities in the works by Mitchell and Abrams/ Dorst. Crucially, he turns to Jessica Pressman’s seminal work on ‘bookishness’. She suggests that it is the very spectre of the printed book’s (real or imagined) obsolescence which engenders new interest in Introduction 15 books as objects and in practices of reading and storytelling. This interest, as Bauer argues, is central the novels’ plots as well as their form. Heidi Liedke also turns to fictional representations of readers who bond over their reading practices. She explores Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? as a metafictional and metanarrative comment on the power of reading in a digitalised media environment. Resonating with Karschay’s treatment of eighteenth-century epistolary culture, Liedke’s contribution elucidates how, in Rooney’s novel, exchanges via email become the main vehicle for reflecting on the potential for reading practices to function as acts of care and self-care. An important touchstone for this analysis is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential discussion of paranoid and reparative modes of reading. While Bauer’s and Liedke’s contributions demonstrate that the fictional representation of reading constellations continues to be a central theme in contemporary fiction - and thus also a fruitful field of inquiry for literary scholars interested in functions of reading in the twenty-first century - Alena Heinritz’ article centres on the testimony of flesh-and-blood readers. She examines how on ‘bookish’ social media platforms such as BookTube and BookTok, readers record the integration of reading practices into their daily lives. These “reading routines” are decidedly social; readers who record and post these videos harness books and reading to gain social recognition and distinction. The videos thus function as performative assertions of their makers’ identities as readers. Heinritz’ contribution also pays attention to the flip side of the enabling, reparative, perhaps even utopian dimensions of social reading. Heinritz shows how readers on bookish social media are implicated in the logic of a commercial media environment, thus reminding us of the commodification of reading. But then, as Christina Lupton points out in her afterword to this special issue, books have always been part of a market of commercial exchange, and social reading practices do not operate outside of this sphere. In any case, social reading is subject to different types of pressure and, in turn, creates them. 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