Reading Habits in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abigail Boucher is Lecturer in English Literature at Aston University, UK. She specialises in genre and popular fiction of the long nineteenth century, with interests in the body, class, and medicine and science in literature. Marcello Giovanelli is Reader in Literary Linguistics at Aston University, UK. His research is in the area of stylistics and specifically in cognitive and empirical approaches to reading literature within different contexts. Chloe Harrison is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Aston University, UK. Her research explores cognitive stylistics, reader response studies and contemporary fiction.
 Robbie Love is Lecturer in English Language at Aston University, UK. He is a corpus linguist, specialising in contemporary spoken discourse, and advocates for the application of corpus approaches to address societal challenges.
Caroline Godfrey is Researcher in Applied Linguistics at Aston University, UK. Her work concentrates on the language used to conceptualise English education in the UK, with a particular focus on the use of metaphor.

This book presents and analyses the results of the Lockdown Library Project survey, using a range of quantitative and qualitative approaches to provide a unique insight into the ways in which the first UK COVID-19 lockdown affected public reading habits. The authors begin by outlining the background to the study, the research methodology and design, and an overview of the headlines of the data, before going on to survey the literature on the relationship between pandemics, literature (especially the role played by genre and popular fiction) and reading habits. They then examine how participants reported that the lockdown period had affected the amount that they read; how they accessed books and discussed their reading with others; the use of reading as a coping strategy; and returning to re-read books that offered familiarity, reliability, and nostalgia. Finally, the concluding chapter brings together the overall findings of the project and briefly outlines future work in the field. This book will be of interest to academics in fields such as literary and genre studies, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics, health humanities, and sociology, as well as practitioners working in education, in bibliotherapy, and in libraries.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Reading, Genre, and Crisis.- Chapter 3: Reading and Time.- Chapter 4: Reading as a Coping Strategy.- Chapter 5: Re-reading in the Pandemic.- Chapter 6: Lockdown Experiences of Social Reading. -Chapter 7: Conclusion.