Goodreads: A social network site for book readers

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 21/12/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23733 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Goodreads is an Amazon‐owned book‐based social web site for members to share books, read, review books, rate books, and connect with other readers. Goodreads has tens of millions of book reviews, recommendations, and ratings that may help librarians and readers to select relevant books. This article describes a first investigation of the properties of Goodreads users, using a random sample of 50,000 members. The results suggest that about three quarters of members with a public profile are female, and that there is little difference between male and female users in patterns of behavior, except for females registering more books and rating them less positively. Goodreads librarians and super‐users engage extensively with most features of the site. The absence of strong correlations between book‐based and social usage statistics (e.g., numbers of friends, followers, books, reviews, and ratings) suggests that members choose their own individual balance of social and book activities and rarely ignore one at the expense of the other. Goodreads is therefore neither primarily a book‐based website nor primarily a social network site but is a genuine hybrid, social navigation site.University of Wolverhampto

The new novel of manners: Chick lit and postfeminist sexual politics

Chick lit, a subgenre of women\u27s fiction, has been commercially popular for a decade, yet academic analyses are scant and often confined to discussions of a single text. This dissertation investigates chick lit as a genre as well as an overlooked source of sociocultural commentary. I set up a literary historical framework to examine chick lit\u27s reworking of major narrative traditions, and, in conjunction, use chick lit as a lens through which to view gender relations in U.S. and British society in the 1990s. In each chapter I approach chick lit in a different way---as a realistic parody of Harlequin romance, as a female Bildungsroman employing novel of manners classics as frequent intertexts, and as a counter-paradigm, at times backlash, to feminism---in order to piece together different pieces of its origins and popularity. Together these chapters provide a history of conditions in publishing, consumer culture, and heterosexual courtship that have coalesced to produce this genre of veiled memoir. I draw on texts from both literary history and popular media: chick lit novels themselves, journalism, online discussion forums, author websites and interviews, industry advertisements, and lifestyle periodicals. I conclude that while chick lit was supposed to be, according to journalist Anna Weinberg, the bright light of postfeminist writing, it is now a historical component of postmodernism\u27s fin de siècle. Despite a myopic social vision, these urban period pieces bring to the contemplative tradition of the novel of manners elements of adventure fiction; they extend Jane Austen\u27s comedic legacy; and they rework Edith Wharton\u27s treatment of courtship into semi-comedic form. Chick lit has monumentally changed the representation of single women in literature by portraying not figures of pity, illness, or derision, but a cast of funny, usually capable women not looking to settle. Chick lit\u27s humor belies an ambitious amalgamation of literary and popular forms, regardless of whether the ultimate product betrays solipsism and limited literary ability. Though imparting more social commentary than criticism, chick lit has established humorous fiction for women as a full-fledged literary category

“Not the story you wanted to hear": reading chick-lit in JM Coetzee’s Summertime

J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime has been widely explored – both for its controversy and merits – as engaging in “acts of genre” where the inscription of an autobiographical narrative simultaneously serves as a metatextual and ideological critique of its form. Similarly, this article is intrigued by generic instability, but our terrain lies further afield, exploring how the narrative lapses from the lofty ideals of romance to the baser “truth” of chick-lit. In Summertime, all the female characters besmirch Mr. Vincent, the biographer, for wanting to cast John Coetzee in the role of a romantic hero. Yet, their resistance results in a series of romantic failures which then situates Summertime in the generic ambit of chick-lit. In embodying a spirit that is as playful as it is critical, we suggest that Coetzee offers an opportunity to cast aside a literary critical tradition of suspicion and, in doing so, passes critical comment on how we approach a popular genre like chick-lit