Diachronic perspectives on digital reading culture: Crying readers from the age of sensibility to BookTok

Abstract

This article uses a diachronic approach to examine how on social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, readers of fiction discuss and also stage strong affects connected with their reading of ‘books that made me cry’. While this trend may seem to be generated wholly by the affordances of digital media, it will be examined in what interesting ways it also connects with the eighteenth-century vogue for sentimental reading. Considering three dimensions of reading that have often been sidelined in literary studies – reading as a physical process, as a communal activity and as a performance – the article presents in-depth analyses of representations of crying readers in both reading cultures. It pays special attention to the changing norms and values connected with reading, which manifest themselves in contemporary discourses on the reader in the respective centuries, such as ‘sentimental reading’ and ‘ugly crying’.