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2 results

International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity

International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity
  • Rachel Noorda, Millicent Weber, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • 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.

  • 33 - Nation and Literature

  • from Part III - Intersections: National(ist) Synergies and Tensions with Other Social, Economic, Political, and Cultural Categories, Identities, and Practices
  • Edited by Cathie Carmichael, University of East Anglia, Matthew D'Auria, University of East Anglia, Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism
    Published online:
    08 November 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 706-726

  • Summary

    Ever since the era of Romanticism, it has been a commonplace to link language and literature to ideas of nationhood. The ideal “nation” is understood to be one that unites all people speaking the same language within a common territory, effectively constituting a nation-state. This principle undergirds most nineteenth- and twentieth-century processes of nation formation in Europe. In some cases, this has led to the breakup of larger territorial units organized along earlier and different principles into smaller units. In other cases, it has led to the unification of territories previously divided. Notwithstanding the principle cited, many of the countries thus constituted have within their borders linguistic minorities. Some European countries have no language of their own, using one or more languages that are claimed, and usually also perceived, as the “national” language of other, bigger countries. In all instances, literature, as the most visible and enduring embodiment of a people’s language, serves as a binding element.