| |
| author |
Sarah Selim
| | title |
'What's Yours is Ours': BookTok, the Romance Genre, and the Authorial Reader
| | abstract |
This thesis examines how romance readers' understanding of the genre and relationship with
literature are changing as technology and social media advance. Specifically, this thesis aims to
contextualize and analyze the discoursal practices of readers on "BookTok," the self-determined
community of book lovers on the wildly popular social media platform TikTok, in order to
examine the ways they challenge popular conceptions of readers and fan productivity. By
comparing TikTok's design to the book review app Goodreads and applying John Fiske's criteria
for fandom engagement to the BookTok community, I argue that Goodreads' design observes a
stricter separation between producers (authors) and consumers (readers), whereas BookTok
readers engage with books as a productive and participatory fandom. Through a qualitative
analysis of two fan-made TikToks based on Elle Kennedy's popular contemporary romance
novel The Deal (2015), I argue that BookTok users engage so closely with the text as to create
self-contained narratives that do not rely on the book itself for meaning or clarity, challenging the
idea that fan-made content is reliant upon or subordinate to its source text. These retellings shed
light on how the practices of social media engagement and reading are becoming more closely
intertwined and causing a change in the romance genre's appeal to readers. Through a closer
examination of TikTok's algorithm as an agent of moderation and curation, I also consider the
dangerous possibility that TikTok is perpetuating existing dynamics of power and conformity
within readers, authors, and the romance genre itself. Overall, this thesis calls for romance
readers, authors, and publishers to consider how technology is allowing readers to evolve from
passive consumers to active arbiters of genre literature, and the potential consequences of this on
how new literature is produced and received.
| | school |
The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University
| | degree |
B.A. (2024)
|
| advisor |
Sandra Jamieson
|
| full text | SSelim.pdf |
| |
