The Social Lives of Books: Reading Victorian Literature on Goodreads

Abstract

International Bibliography and the Open Syllabus Project, in order to better understand the preferences of readers of Victorian literature from different but overlapping communities. We find that the majority of works of Victorian literature that are indicated as being read on Goodreads occur about as often as they are taught or written about in the academy, although books aimed at an adult audience are written about more frequently in peerreviewed venues. Interestingly, those works that are statistical outliers in terms of their greater popularity with a general audience than an academic audience tend to feature women authors, children's literature, and works with a strong female protagonist. Turning to an analysis of the written reviews on Goodreads of three outliers that were more popular with a general audience-A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, and The Secret Garden-we find that readers tend to comment on plot (especially in Dickens), feminist themes (in Jane Eyre), and the importance of characters (in all three works). In conclusion, we suggest ways in which postsecondary teachers might draw on these results to inform their syllabi and formulate strategies for teaching Victorian literature. We argue that in terms of outliers, popular taste in Victorian literature among Goodreads users reflects more general reading preferences among this user group, as readers turn to the Victorian era to read children's literature and books featuring strong female characters.

The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities

“…25 Karen Bourrier and Mike Thelwall differently explore how gendered cultural expectations drive "the social lives of books" by comparing the incidence of women authors and female characters in Victorian literature on Goodreads, in the MLA International Bibliography, and on syllabi from the Open Syllabus Project. 26 Bourrier and Thelwall find "a strong correlation between" academic and popular selections of Victorian literature but observe importantly distinct modes of discussing these works: Goodreads reviews manifest supposedly "unacademic forms of reading" such as "readerly identification, reading for character, and reading for plot" that are no less sophisticated and politically engaged in their commitments to strong female protagonists. 27 Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak similarly seek "to hear nonacademic readers' voices" at a scale "difficult if not impossible before the internet" by analyzing 120,000 reviews of 144 "classics" as most shelved and read by Goodreads users.…”

Complexities associated with user-generated book reviews in digital libraries

“…In the last two decades, researchers have been uncovering historical archives [37] and developing contemporary book reception corpora in support of empirical investigations in reading behavior, reader response, reception, literary appreciation, etc [9,19,25]. User-generated book reviews on social reading/reviewing websites such as Amazon and Goodreads meet this need, and have opened up unprecedented research possibilities for studies in digital humanities (DH) and cultural analytics (CA) [36,68], library and information sciences [6,47,73], literary history [10], computer-supported cooperative work [4,61], social network analysis [49,54], etc. However, research limitations and gaps have also emerged from this burgeoning research area, particularly in DH.…”

The reading background of Goodreads book club members: a female fiction canon?

“…For example, comparing the Victorian novels most frequently taught and written about by academics to those most frequently read on Goodreads can reveal differences and similarities in reading patterns among academics and general readers. (Bourrier and Thelwall, submitted).…”