Reading, Genre, and Crisis

This chapter surveys the literature on the relationship between pandemics, literature (especially the role played by genre and popular fiction), and reading habits. Drawing on previous studies, we first examine how world pandemics and public health emergencies involving widespread illness have had significant literary and cultural impacts. We specifically examine the relationship of particular genres to times of crisis highlighting how, historically, crisis is manifested often through the production and consumption of genre fiction (as opposed to what might be considered ‘literary’ fiction), and how there is a long history of readers both confronting anxieties and escaping them through genre fiction. We explore how genre fiction may be a prism through which we can understand contemporary events and provide readers with the distance to work through contemporary anxieties. We then turn to our data by examining the genres that participants in our survey said they read more and those which they said they avoided—and their reasons for doing so. Our analysis demonstrates the relationship between particular genres of literature and the need to cope at a time of crisis.