Corona Time: Reading Novels During the Covid 19 Pandemic

This paper is the result of study that began in the summer of 2020, into the habits of novel readers under lockdown in Denmark and the UK. Our report builds on 800 surveys and sixty extensive interviews in the two national contexts, suggesting that the consumption of novels, both in paper and audio form, played a critical part in the way many readers experienced the pandemic. While we began the study in the spirit of many journalists reporting on the upsurge in book sales in Spring 2020, by imagining people seizing the time they had been waiting for to read Proust or Joyce, we have ended up reaching a somewhat more complicated set of conclusions. Although some of the readers we spoke to do fall into this category, of being people who had more time to read under lockdown, most describe more complicated engagements with narrative that reflected the unique moment in history in which they were accessing books. This paper stresses the way temporal co-ordinates matter – both to the way readers interpret and respond to books – and as a dimension in which the effects of novel reading make themselves felt.



By Professor Tina Lupton and Postdoc Johanne Gormsen Schmidt, University of Copenhagen



The event is chaired by Professor Rita Felski and organized by the Center for Uses of Literature