Ames, Melissa. “Engaging ‘Apolitical’ Adolescents: Analyzing the Popularity and Educational Potential of Dystopian Literature Post-9/11.” High School Journal, vol. 97, no. 1, Fall 2013, pp. 3–20. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1353/hsj.2013.0023.
Melissa Ames’s article looks into the growth in popularity of dystopian novels post 9/11. As the target audience for the dystopian genre is typically young adults, the increasing popularity of these novels shows that this group finds interest in politics and social issues. This article is important because it can shed light on as to why novels of the dystopian genre are further up the list of the most popular novels of all time. The information within this article can help look further into the correlation between popular novels and issues people find within contemporary society. For example, a book may become more popular if the issues it addresses are relevant to social issues in society today.
Billington, James H. “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom Civil Rights Era (1950–1963).” Library of Congress, 10 Oct. 2014, www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/civil-rights-era.html.
This article in the Library of Congress talks about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the overall impact of the Civil Rights Movement. This is relevant to our research as it serves as a case study for the rise of classics books in the 60’s, and especially aligns with the publishing of To Kill a Mockingbird during this movement. It helps us answer the question of how certain societal events correspond with literary genres.
Jones, Calvert W., and Celia Paris. “It’s the End of the World and They Know It: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes.” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 16, no. 4, 2018, pp. 969–989., https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592718002153.
This journal article argues for the need to study how fiction affects political attitudes and proposes a genre-based approach to investigate the effects of dystopian narratives on political attitudes. The resource is important because it highlights the potential impact of fiction on political attitudes and behavior, providing insight into the role that popular culture may play in shaping societal trends and political outcomes. This journal article is specifically relevant to my thesis work because it examines the effects of popular culture on political attitudes and behavior, which will help us towards answering our research question. Furthermore, it provides a framework for analyzing the relationship between dystopian literature and political attitudes, which will be useful in developing a approach for analyzing the impact of popular literature on social issues.
Kousha, Kayvan, et al. “Goodreads Reviews to Assess the Wider Impacts of Books.” Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68, no. 8, Aug. 2017, pp. 2004–16. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23805.
This article looks into the website Goodreads and how user data from this site, such as book ratings and reviews, can be valuable in assessing the impact and value of books. This resource provides statistics and data on just how useful the site is for finding a good quantity of quality and accurate book reviews for researching the impact of various books. This could be helpful for our research because of how our aim is to assess the popularity of novels within our dataset and see whether the issues they address left a wider cultural/societal impact.
Kukkonen, Karin, and Ylva Østby. “Readers during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Scientific Study of Literature, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.22005.kuk.
This article focuses on a case study of Norwegian readers and their reading habits and emotional experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. This resource is important as it emphasizes the impact of universal, large-scale events on the emotional well-being of humans, and conveys how the role of literature plays a big part as a coping mechanism during these challenging times. The journal’s analysis of reading habits and how they align with emotional experiences during the pandemic can give us insight into how genre popularity could be influenced by universal social events that connect with the collective emotional state of society as a whole.
Levy, Daniel S. “Harper Lee, ‘to Kill a Mockingbird’ and Civil Rights.” Time, 20 Feb. 2016, time.com/3928162/mockingbird-civil-rights-movement/.
This article focuses on the influential book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and how it fits into the Civil Rights Movement. This is significant for our findings as it is a perfect example of how literature parallels the happenings in society outside of the pages. Both the Civil Rights movement and the distribution of To Kill a Mockingbird inspired each other and generated social change and activism.
Mallan, Kerry. “Dystopian Fiction for Young People: Instructive Tales of Resilience.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 1, 2017, pp. 16–24., https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2017.1250586.
The abstract discusses the rise and popularity of dystopian fiction in recent years, and how critics often attribute this trend to the impact of the September 11 attacks on the world, particularly in the United States. The events of September 11, 2001 heightened anxiety about terrorism, which has been lowered and raised by increased surveillance practices, security checks, and warnings. However, the abstract argues that other changes since the late 20th century, such as globalization, immigration, and advances in technology, have also raised concerns and anxieties that are reflected in dystopian narratives. The abstract notes that dystopian fiction presents a diverse range of future scenarios, with some offering a pessimistic outlook and others offering a “horizon of hope.” The assumption of current societal trends into the worst possible future scenarios is a common theme in dystopian fiction. Overall, the abstract suggests that the popularity of dystopian fiction reflects a growing sense of unease and uncertainty about the future, as people grapple with the complex and interconnected challenges facing the world today. This will help us answer our research question as this article could be a helpful resource in gaining insights into the cultural and political trends or reader’s preferences.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Whose Odds? The Absence of Climate Justice in American Climate Fiction Novels, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 26, Issue 4, Autumn 2019, Pages 944–967, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isz081
This journal article explains how cli-fi became a genre and the history of this genre. This is important because it explains how this genre starts to affect readers’ opinions and personal beliefs on climate change. This helps us understand how current topics have effects on readers based on books they read, in this case would include cli-fi, will also help explain and give context to the time period where cli-fi books may appear more popular.
McAlister, Jodi. “Defining and Redefining Popular Genres: The Evolution of ‘New Adult’ Fiction.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, Dec. 2018, pp. 1–19. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=133491420&site=ehost-live.
Jodi McAlister’s article assesses the emergence and evolution of the ‘New Adult’ fiction genre. As the genre has come up fairly recently, we can see the timeline of how and when it became popular. Through this article, we would be able to see why a particular genre might gain popularity and whether there are any specific correlations to its growth. The pattern of its growth can give us insights on how other genres may grow.
Piters, Ronald A.M.P., and Mia J.W. Stokmans. Genre Categorization and Its Effect on Preference for Fiction Books. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 18(2), 159–166, July 2000, https://doi.org/10.2190/0VJF-Y04E-H5NU-VL5B.
The article speaks about the relationship between the preference of the reader for a specific genre and their ability to categorize those genres just based on looking at the cover of the book. The resource is important as it not only gives us a look into what types of books and genres were popular in the time period it was published, but also allows us to compare ratings of specific genres amongst one another in fiction books specifically. The resource examines the relationship between book genre perceived rating based on initial impressions, and final ratings. This helps answer my research question as we can see which genres scored higher based on the study.
Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers.” Environmental Humanities, Duke University Press, 1 Nov. 2018, https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/10/2/473/136689/The-Influence-of-Climate-FictionAn-Empirical.
This article explains how a group from Duke went and surveyed a bunch of readers on climate fiction about their beliefs towards climate change. This is important because this shows the real results of climate change books and after they’re published and in the public, this is the general results. This article also teaches us the political side of this and explains what we could see in the near future. This will show how topics in books affect readers and to establish a narrative.
Sherif H Ismail, On Why Less is More in Climate Fiction, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2022;, isac057, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isac057
This scholarly article explains more on the genre cli-fi and the implications on how this was brought up. This article is very important because it focuses a lot on absences and silences which is important to think about regarding any topic. This will help resolve why current issues are brought up through textiles and give us more context to understand our data more.
Stejskal, Jan, and Petr Hajek. “The Impact of COVID-19 on e-Book Reading Behavior: The Case of the Municipal Library of Prague.” The Library Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 4, 2022, pp. 388–404., https://doi.org/10.1086/721402.
This article presents a case study within the Municipal Library in Prague, Czech Republic that studies the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on e-book readers and their behavior, specifically the changes in preferences about how books are obtained, reasons for using e-books, ways of handling e-books, preferred e-book genres, and readers’ willingness to pay for e-books. Accessibility is an important conversation to have especially surrounding the pandemic and how it has limited people’s accessibility to resources—this article tackles this conversation surrounding how reader preferences and habits have been altered due to the unavailability of physical library services. This resource shares findings on how the pandemic has affected readers’ preferences for certain book genres, which ties into our study of popularity spikes of genres and the social issues arising from the pandemic.
Thelwall, Mike. Book Genre and Author Gender: Romance>Paranormal-Romance to Autobiography>Memoir. Jasist, 21 Dec. 2016, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23768.
This article uses data from Goodreads to see whether or not there is a relationship between the author’s gender and the genre of the book that they authored. This is significant as it can help illustrate how the author’s gender can be related to certain genres as well as specific themes within said genres. This helps answer my research question in that we could potentially see female or male authors writing about specific topics which relate to the societal issues that they experience at the time.
Utami, Sri, and Jumaidi Nur. “An Analysis of Students’ Reading Interest during Learning from Home amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic.” IJEE (Indonesian Journal of English Education), vol. 1, no. 1, 2021, pp. 140–155., https://doi.org/10.15408/ijee.v1i1.17157.
This article looks into students’ reading interests during the pandemic under the virtual learning policy, specifically focusing on a case study on the English Department of the University of Kutai Kartanegara in Tenggarong, Indonesia. This resource is significant because it explores how the pandemic and the remote learning policies that were created specifically for the pandemic have impacted students’ reading preferences and habits, addressing challenges faced by students generated by this new medium of learning. Aligning with our research question, this resource reveals how students showed a preference for reading fiction, specifically romance novels, which can possibly establish a trend or tendency to lean towards novels of escapism and emotion when faced with the challenge of the pandemic and virtual learning.
Walsh, Melanie, and Maria Antoniak. The Goodreads “Classics”: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism, Journal of Cultural Analytics, 20 Apr. 2021, https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.22221.
This article looks more so at the Classics genre on Goodreads and speaks on how amateur book reviewers view the term “Classics”. This is significant as judging based on how the general population views a certain classic book, we could look into the subgenres of those specific books and examine if there is any relation between those genres and the events of the current day. This helps answer my research question as it can highlight the varying themes over different time periods and compare them to specific events and issues over said time periods.
Wiederhold, Brenda K. “Booktok Made Me Do It: The Evolution of Reading.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, vol. 25, no. 3, 2022, pp. 157–158., https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2022.29240.editorial.
The article discusses the emergence of BookTok, a sub-community within TikTok, that has become a significant driver of book sales in 2021. The article explains how BookTok operates, how it differs from traditional book reviews, and why it has become so popular. The article also highlights the role of the COVID pandemic in the growth of BookTok and the increased interest in reading during the lockdowns. Additionally, the article discusses the evolution of the concept of books as objects and how BookTok is part of a broader trend of using social media to connect with like-minded individuals. The article concludes by arguing that BookTok’s success is not solely due to the pandemic but is also a result of the unique features of the platform and the way it connects readers in new and innovative ways. BookTok can be used as a tool to understand how younger generations are engaging with literature and sharing their emotional reactions to books, which may be useful in analyzing contemporary reading trends.
