Readers of Popular Fiction and Emotion Online

Abstract

One of the striking features of popular fiction is that at least part of its readership can be identified as fans: deeply knowledgeable and passionately engaged with a book, author or genre, and active participants in the non-academic reception of these cultural products. In his book Popular Fiction: Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, Ken Gelder writes that popular fiction ‘often enjoys a particular kind of reader loyalty, one that can build itself around not just a writer and his or her body of work (which certainly happens) but the entire genre and the culture that imbues it. In other words, popular fiction has fans’ (2004, p. 81). Fan studies have historically recognized ‘textual p..