International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity

Abstract

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.