Diachronic perspectives on digital reading culture: Crying readers from the age of sensibility to BookTok

Abstract

This article uses a diachronic approach to examine how on social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, readers of fiction discuss and also stage strong affects connected with their reading of ‘books that made me cry’. While this trend may seem to be generated wholly by the affordances of digital media, it will be examined in what interesting ways it also connects with the eighteenth-century vogue for sentimental reading. Considering three dimensions of reading that have often been sidelined in literary studies – reading as a physical process, as a communal activity and as a performance – the article presents in-depth analyses of representations of crying readers in both reading cultures. It pays special attention to the changing norms and values connected with reading, which manifest themselves in contemporary discourses on the reader in the respective centuries, such as ‘sentimental reading’ and ‘ugly crying’.

1. Introduction

The last two decades have seen fundamental changes in the production, distribution and reception of literary texts – in sum, the development of what Murray (2018) has influentially dubbed the ‘digital literary sphere’. A part of this sphere that has lately begun to receive sustained attention is the rise of new reading cultures (see e.g., the special issues on reading in digital environments edited by Allington and Pihlaja (2016) as well as Fuller and Rehberg Sedo (2019)). More specifically, on social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and in the past few years most prominently on TikTok, we can witness the formation of ‘bookish’ reading communities (Reddan et al., 2024). ¹ It may seem self-evident that these phenomena, which I call ‘Digital Reading Culture’, primarily should be understood as affordances of a new media ecology. ² Such a paradigm is indeed very useful in that it draws attention to the media environment and larger sets of practices in which Digital Reading Culture is embedded. However, not everything that at first glance runs counter to established views of how literary culture is supposed to work is necessarily a new development. ³ In order to get a better sense of what may truly be new about the Digital Reading Culture on social media, one also has to study lines of connection and continuities.

In this article, I am going to argue for and demonstrate the necessity of a diachronic perspective for a full understanding of Digital Reading Culture by examining a contemporary phenomenon that may at first sight seem outlandish: a fascination, even obsession, with ‘books that made me cry’. Both BookTube and BookTok feature a considerable number of videos in which readers not only talk about such responses to books, but evoke and perform them for their online communities in various ways – including the attempt to capture their own tears on camera. In some ways, this emphasis on affect appears as a typical effect of the current media environment. Critical detachment from one’s reading material is not a stance that is generally appreciated on the bookish social media – typically, they feature what Murray (mainly with reference to online reviewing sites, e.g., on Amazon or Goodreads, but also mentioning ‘Booktuber channels’, 2018: 121) calls a ‘celebration of affect’ (2018: 125). As Stein has shown in her incisive study of twenty-first-century fan culture, the emphasis on ‘what is known in millennial culture as “feels”’, that is ‘tout[ing] emotional response’ (2015: 156) is evident in online fan communities in general. Regarding the crying readers on BookTube or BookTok as participants in the ‘feels culture’ of such broader transmedia fan activities (fans of particular authors/books or reading in general) goes a long way towards illuminating practices on these platforms.

At the same time, however, such tears shed by readers point us back to earlier periods in the history of reading, especially to the eighteenth century, which saw intense interest in the idea of ‘sentimental reading’ (Mullan, 1996). Particularly famous testimony on weeping about novels comes from Lady Bradshaigh, who vividly describes reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) in her letters to the author:

When alone, in agonies would I lay down the book, take it up again, walk about the room, let fall a flood of tears, wipe my eyes, read again […] throw away the book, crying out, excuse me, good Mr Richardson, I cannot go on; it is your fault – you have done more than I can bear […] again I read, again I acted the same part […] My spirits are strangely seized, my sleep is disturbed; waking in the night, I burst into a passion of crying; so I did at breakfast this morning, and just now again. (quoted in Gordon, 1997: 492)

Mullan cites this passage with palpable discomfiture, noting that ‘[to] encounter these feelings now is to glimpse strange evidence of what were once the ‘sentimental’ powers of fiction’ (1996: 246–247). Another scholar studying tearful reading in eighteenth-century literature, Csengei, asks: ‘Have our reading practices changed so much that we consider the eighteenth century’s indulgence of the reader’s emotions distasteful or difficult to comprehend?’ (2008: 968).

In the time since these statements were made, the interest in the power of fiction to elicit tears has come back in full force on social media (if indeed it was ever gone from the experience of the non-academic reader). In what follows, I will trace and discuss the almost uncanny similarities between the rhetoric of readerly affect used by Lady Bradshaigh and the ways in which the crying readers on BookTube and BookTok describe and stage their responses. This is not to say that nothing has changed in the status and significance of literary reading between the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. Indeed, looking at the reading testimonials more closely will not only show them to be part of a long discourse tradition concerning the effects and functions of literary reading, but also highlight the extent to which they are mired in specific contemporary notions on reading, the literary landscapes of their day and, not least, the possibilities and constraints afforded by the respective larger media ecologies.

2. ‘Books that made me cry’: A brief introduction to digital reading culture

Digital Reading Culture has over the past few years rapidly gained significance for the way in which younger generations of readers encounter fictional texts: they use social media platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, to represent acts of reading and perform reader identities online. One way of looking at Digital Reading Culture is to see it as utilizing “online venues for amateur literary criticism” (Murray, 2018: 120). However, while recommending books to other readers is clearly a prominent function, most of the Digital Reading Culture contributions do not conform to the common expectation of a sustained and critical engagement with a particular text. Instead, they are often about displaying ‘bookish’ items and activities and bonding with others around the idea that ‘being a reader’ can serve as a distinct identity marker. This is reflected in some of the most popular formats for videos on BookTube (also often referenced on BookTok): the TBR or ‘to be read’ (listing books one has bought and intends to read), the reading vlog (a video capturing how and when a reader reads in the course of a day) or the read-a-thon (participation in challenges such as reading a certain number of pages or books in a particular period of time).

BookTube and Bookstagram came into their own as online communities of practice in the early and mid 2010s, respectively (see Scolari et al., 2021). While there are practitioners on both BookTube and Bookstagram who have six-figure numbers of followers, it is the newest platform that has managed to establish itself as a major player in the digital literary sphere (sensu Murray, 2018). BookTok, the bookish contingent on the Chinese social media platform TikTok, which was launched as a worldwide service in 2018, underwent a period of rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. By now it has gained such popularity – with teen readers in particular – that is has become a main fixture in the marketing strategy of many publishers (especially in the Young Adult sector) and in bookstores (see e.g., Currenti, 2023). In the following, I will discuss examples from both BookTube and BookTok.

The celebration of affect registered by commentators like Murray (2018) can be found both in the response to reading content and in the way in which the reader community is addressed on social media. Crying, the particular subject of my exploration into readerly affect in this article, is featured in a range of different representative modes. ⁴ First of all, it is referenced in the titles of posts such as ‘books that crushed my heart and made me sob for hours’, ‘4 books that will make you ugly cry’ or ‘books that destroyed my soul and had me weeping for days’. Thumbnail images often also display visual prompts, for example the ‘loudly crying face’ emoji superimposed on books or the readers themselves in the act of crying. Such combinations of linguistic and visual references often also occur in the videos themselves: readers not only describe how they have been crying, but they also capture the act itself on camera.

A Digital Reading Culture format that lends itself especially well to such a representation of crying in progress is the reading vlog with its focus on the ‘day in the life of a reader’. BookTuber Jack Edwards’ video on the channel ‘Jack in the Books’, entitled ‘I read a little life and it made me a little sad’ (2021), is an instructive and much-watched example. ⁵ The video chronicles Edwards’ reading of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), a novel widely discussed because of its vivid representation of the trauma and suffering inflicted by abuse. ⁶ As is typical of the ‘reading vlog’ format, Edwards’ almost eighteen-minute-long video alternates commentary and reading scenes. The BookTuber documents, for instance, how after 100 pages ‘I’ve had some happy tears in my eyes, as well as some sad ones’, shows himself sobbing while reading the last pages, and finally professes that ‘that was the saddest thing I’ve ever encountered’ and that he ‘would not encourage anyone else to put themselves through this’ because ‘you should never take on a book at the risk of your own mental health’ (2021). Kierra Lewis, reading the same book on TikTok, is more dramatic and more succinct. In line with the typical brevity of videos on the platform, we get a medias in res impression of the reading process. Holding her tear-stained face up close to the camera, she raises her voice to a wail: ‘I can’t do this sh-t’; then adds ‘someone told me “oh baby, you haven’t even got to part four yet”. I said “What’s part four? I already done experienced enough” – Oh god!’ (Lewis, 2023). The even more pronounced focus on affect in the BookTok video can be regarded as typical: Reddan et al. (2024: 30) observe that TikTok is the platform that most ‘appeals to readers who want to get swept up in emotion’ while YouTube ‘offers the impression of conversation with a knowledgeable bookish friend’. ⁷

In any case, both readerly reactions, as Mullan’s comment on Lady Bradshaigh’s encounter with Richardson’s Clarissa suggests, are outside of the comfort zone of literary scholarship. It is this sense of discomfort – often also derision – that I wish to unpack and critique in the following analyses and diachronic comparisons. The type of literary reception that crying readers practice is, in Emre’s (2017: 6) terms, ‘paraliterary’: it goes against some of the norms that we – as literary readers and as literary scholars – have internalized. Instead of being about analytic consideration, their reading is about being moved. It is as if they were wholeheartedly embracing a notion of reading that had already congealed into caricature in the nineteenth century: that of the ‘sentimental novel reader’ of George Cruikshank’s 1847 sketch (an illustration in which a servant, instead of going about her duties, sits crying in front of the fire, the household around her in disarray). ⁸ By way of activating stereotypes of both gender and class, Cruikshank derides the crying ‘sentimental’ reader – and by extension the type of reading material she is so engrossed by – as shallow and indulgent. This is in line with the more recent usage of the adjective ‘sentimental’ itself, whose meaning, as the OED notes, has deteriorated from a ‘favourable sense: Characterized by or exhibiting refined and elevated feeling’ to an unfavourable one: ‘[a]ddicted to indulgence in superficial emotion; apt to be swayed by sentiment’ (OED, 2023). ⁹

This does not mean that the sentimental reading mode disappears in subsequent centuries. In her groundbreaking Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, Warhol (2003) shows both how central the idea of readerly feeling is in the American nineteenth-century tradition especially of female novelists popular at the time, and how in the twentieth century such sentimental practices of reception were systematically sidelined. My own analysis follows in the footsteps of Warhol, who makes a strong case that literary criticism should pay serious attention to readers’ feelings, in particular their tears, beyond the often-invoked model of catharsis. She contends that ‘sentimentalism is pointedly not cathartic, that it does not vent or drain emotions, but that it rather encourages readers to rehearse and reinforce the feelings it evokes’ (2003: 18; emphasis original). Rather than herself dismissing such ‘indulgence’ as a sign of superficiality, as the OED entry above does, Warhol is interested in the sexist assumptions underlying such a dismissal, diagnosing a ‘collective recoil from effeminacy’ (2003: 34).

Twenty years after Warhol’s analysis (which obviously did not yet consider social media), many of the practitioners on BookTok and BookTube clearly regard strong feeling as a hallmark of quality, both of reading and reading material. Describing a book as one that ‘made me cry’ is more often than not a form of praise (even, or in fact especially, in combination with the comment that it has ‘destroyed’ or ‘traumatized’ the reader). The readers in both videos mentioned above regard A Little Life as an exceptionally good book and one of their favourite reads; it appears that these extreme and seemingly uncomfortable emotional experiences are actually sought out deliberately. In a short piece for SHARP News, the online journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, Iorio (2023) offers a first description of this phenomenon, commenting that ‘it is clearly important for BookTok readers not only to experience strong emotion from a novel and then recommend that novel to others to experience, but to stage that experience itself to other readers’ (Iorio, 2023). Not only, then, do these readers indulge in affect – they also deliberately put this indulgence on display.

In the remainder of this article, I will offer a comparison between the norms and values attached to reading by the bookish practitioners of Digital Reading Culture on the one hand and those of the eighteenth-century ‘culture of sensibility’ on the other (Barker-Benfield, 1992). I am going to discuss how these norms and values are expressed through the ways in which readers then and now cry about books, and, more importantly, in the manner in which these acts of crying are being represented. Accordingly, I structure this discussion by focusing on three different aspects of reading that I see as coming into play – aspects of reading that have often been sidelined in literary approaches mainly interested in reading as a processing of content (see Birke, 2016). The three aspects are (a) reading as a physical process; (b) reading as a communal activity: and (c) reading as performance.

3. Tears of sensibility and ugly crying: Reading as a physical process

The crying readers of Digital Reading Culture, as the examples above show, are acutely aware of the physicality of their responses to books. They keep close track of their tears (as in the above-cited ‘I’ve had some happy tears in my eyes, as well as some sad ones’) and use the camera to display the effect of reading on the body, whether in the form of stifled sobs or freely streaming eyes. This attention to the physical susceptibility to reading content is reminiscent of the obsolete older meaning of another word closely related to sentimental in the eighteenth-century sense, namely sensibility. As Mullan notes (1996: 238), sensibility originally ‘referred to bodily sensitivities’ and then in the course of the century ‘began to stand for emotional responsiveness’, coming to ‘designate a laudable delicacy in the second half of the century’. The sentimental novel, in turn, was understood to both model and evoke the properly ‘sensible’ response. A work that scholars regard as a culmination of this literary program is Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771). Csengei (2008: 952) describes this novel as ‘immensely popular […] due to its capacity to move and affect deeply, drawing the reader into a culture of tears’ to the extent that ‘crying over The Man of Feeling was the test of the sensibility of its early readers’.

The idea that tears are outward manifestations of inner processes and can therefore serve as evidence that the reader has been affected by what they have read also underlies many of the ‘books that made me cry’ videos in Digital Reading Culture: ‘If you were starting to think that maybe you were a sociopath and not feeling any emotions, well read this book, and if you don’t shed a tear – then congrats, you’ve diagnosed yourself’, quips another reader of A Little Life on BookTok (tayrosen, 2022). Exposing oneself to a book that other bookish commentators have cried about, and documenting the reaction as it happens, is frequently treated as a kind of challenge or dare. ¹⁰

Both the long format of the reading vlog (prominent on BookTube) and the shorter videos that present snippets of readerly reactions (typical of BookTok) allow for a presentation of the reading body in action, in the privacy of the reader’s own home. Schneider (2018: 118) notes the general prominence of the bed as a ‘framing object’ (Rahmenobjekt) on bookish social media – a prop which suggests the intimacy of the reading process. Indeed, in both videos described above, the reader’s bed features as a setting. This serves to highlight the physicality of the reading process as part of a daily routine. Lady Bradshaigh, in her letter to Richardson, performs a similar maneuvre, inviting the letter recipient to share the way in which her reading experiences are integrated into everyday life. She records how her ‘sleep is disturbed; waking in the night, [she] burst into a passion of crying’ (quoted in Gordon, 1997: 492). In a similar vein, Digital Reading Culture practitioners often document meals or drinks alongside their reading. Lady Bradshaigh continues: ‘so I did at breakfast this morning, and just now again’ (quoted in Gordon, 1997: 492). The impression of giving immediate access to a readerly physicality is heightened by her narrative style: Gordon (1997: 493) points out how, in passages like this one, ‘[d]etermined to prove her feelings authentic’, Lady Bradshaigh ‘mimick[s]’ Richardson’s own famous technique of ‘writing to the moment’, where emotions are apparently recorded at the same time that they are being experienced. The reading vlog and its short equivalents afford this impression of simultaneity more seamlessly than does the medium of the letter. Tears are not just reported, but shown; they are validated, and their intensity gauged, by physical signs of emotion that the medium of video captures as a matter of course: tone and volume of voice, distortion of facial features, state of one’s hair, and so on.

In the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, the approval of the crying body’s tears is dependent on an evaluation of the feelings they manifest as both sincere and proportionate. As Mullan (1998: 248) explains, this culture is characterized by a belief in the social value of ‘deep, even disabling feeling’: ‘[t]o possess heightened sensibility is to feel more readily the pleasures and pains of sympathy, to be able to escape self-interest, and therefore to be virtuous’. Novels of the period feature many examples of crying characters that can be seen as modelling such virtues: the eponymous hero of Mackenzie’s already-mentioned Man of Feeling, Harley, is only a particularly prominent case. Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744), an early example of the genre that has been called ‘the novel of sensibility in embryo’ (Barker, 1982), not only has its hero David listen to, and cry tears of empathy over, many other characters’ tales of woe. He also recognizes the superior worth of his future wife, Camilla, when he recounts one of these stories to her, and ‘she could not refrain from weeping. David was melted into Tenderness at the sight of her Tears; and yet, inwardly, rejoiced at the Thoughts of her being capable of shedding them on so just an Occasion’ (Fielding, 1998: 135).

However, not all crying characters in the novel merit the same praise; David Simple also contains an episode centering on a woman who draws David’s attention because she sobs and laments in an especially noisy manner. It turns out that her tears have been occasioned by her husband’s deciding to use a sum of money to pay off a debt rather than buying clothes for her. David’s friends laugh at the woman instead of commiserating with her, with the effect that she

turned her melancholy Tone into a scolding one. She was not very young, and the Wrinkles in her Face were filled with drops of Water which had fallen from her Eyes; which, with the Yellowness of her Complexion, made a Figure not unlike a Field in the decline of the Year, when Harvest is gathered in, and a smart Shower of Rain has filled the Furrows with Water. Her Voice was so shrill, they all jumped into the Coach as fast as they could, and drove from the Door. (Fielding, 1998: 150)

The scene, which initially seems to be a serious one, is thus transformed into farce. The reader of David Simple is prompted to join David and his friends in regarding these particular tears as ridiculous. This evaluation, initially based on the judgement that the character’s emotions are unworthy because they are called forth by greed and selfishness, also has a gender-specific aspect. The way in which the passage emphasizes the woman’s age and lack of good looks suggests that the culture of sensibility prefers to locate beautiful souls in beautiful bodies, especially if these bodies are female. In turn, immoderate display of emotion also tends to make bodies look ugly. Many of the tears that are shed in these novels may look excessive to later commentators, but within the logic of the discourse of the culture of sensibility, they are laudable if, and only if, they are commensurate with ideas of refinement, of ‘delicate’ feeling.

Twenty-first-century Digital Reading Culture is also very much focused on the look of the crying recipient, but in contrast to the eighteenth century, the most prominent kind of crying is now ‘ugly crying’: weeping so hard that one loses control of one’s facial expression. The phrase itself (also used as a noun, as in ‘the ugly cry’ and ‘the ugly crier’) is employed frequently by BookTokers and BookTubers; for instance, the above-quoted Jack Edwards, in another video which lists ‘10 sad books that made me sob like a little baby’ (A Little Life among them) quips that ‘[i]f a book makes me ugly cry […], I will be highly recommending it’ (Edwards, 2022). That ‘ugly crying’ has become a set phrase is also suggested by the online edition of Merriam-Webster: their section on ‘Words We’re Watching’, defined as being ‘about words we are increasingly seeing in use but that have not yet met our criteria for entry’ into the dictionary proper, includes an article on ‘The Origin of the “Ugly Cry”’ (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). The entry proposes that in the late 1970s ‘ugly crying’ started to be used to refer to the facial expression of the crying person (rather than the sound); “the ugly cry” used as a noun started to appear in the late 1990s and ‘rocketed to fame with Oprah Winfrey’, who in her daytime TV show routinely used the phrase as well as demonstrating the phenomenon. It seems significant that Oprah’s Book Club, a segment of the Oprah Winfrey Show that ran between 1996 and 2011, holds a central position in the development of what Collins (2010: 2) has called ‘popular literary culture’, thus connecting the rise of the phrase and the practice of reading. Oprah’s Book Club has been described as a ‘landmark literary influence in contemporary [US] society’, and as part of a ‘long tradition that deploys affect, affinity, accessibility, and activism in the symbiotic relationships of readers and texts’, a tradition putting female readers centre stage (Harker and Farr, 2008: 3).

Particularly in its ‘unabashed appeals to emotion’ (Harker and Farr, 2008: 3) vis-a-vis a large audience of passionate amateur readers, Oprah’s Book Club should be regarded as a predecessor of Digital Reading Culture. Even though the ‘ugly cry’ is by no means limited to use in the bookish sphere, its popularity on BookTok and BookTube is a testament to a similar ethos of empathetic reception as that found in Oprah’s influential show. Edwards’ video spells out the notion, underlying many contributions in Digital Reading Culture, that one important measure for the quality of a work of fiction is its ability to elicit empathy with the characters: ‘that’s the sign of amazing writing to me, you really feel for these characters so much so that when they’re happy, you feel this profound joy, and when they’re sad, it’s crushing to you as well’ (Edwards, 2021). Even though Digital Reading Culture practitioners have no problem with admitting and endorsing the self-indulgent aspect of reading for the sake of inducing ‘feels’, there are also many instances where the idea of reading for empathy-as-virtue still strongly resonates.

What is striking about the rhetoric that surrounds the ugly cry on Digital Reading Culture – and a very clear difference to its eighteenth-century equivalent – is that even though readers often suggest that the ugliness of their crying has the potential to be embarrassing, it also appears to be seen as a mark of quality. In an illuminating short article in the journal The New Republic, Cote (2016) explores ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Ugly Cry’ in contemporary popular culture. As she explains, ugly crying signals that ‘we’ve relinquished our bodies to wild, emotive energy. We cease to assimilate, to self-curate, and our face mutates into social illegibility’ (Cote, 2016). Giving in to the ugly cry in front of the camera, then, can be seen as liberating oneself from the pressure to conform to social conventions, to keep up a façade, to look attractive. The Kierra Lewis medias in res video, which seems designed to make the Digital Reading Culture practitioner look as dishevelled and distraught as possible, is a good example of this defiance of such norms of self-restraint (especially female self-restraint). The fact that this video already had two million likes a little more than 3 months after it was posted suggests that it touched a nerve in the BookTok community. The fascination with the performance of the ugly cry can be seen as an approval of what is seen as an authentic, ‘uncurated’ reader response. On BookTok especially, where videos are usually shorter than a minute, the ugly cry becomes a shorthand to signal that the community is given access to ‘the real thing’, a spontaneous reaction to the content of a book. At the same time, the many videos and comments that explicitly use ‘ugly crying’ as a label also register a paradox, as they are drawing attention to the primacy of that which is supposedly renounced, namely the appearance or look of the reader.

4. To weep or not to weep: Reading as a communal activity

The ease with which a concept such as ‘ugly crying’ can be used as a reference point (e.g., as a theme highlighted in a hashtag) indicates that for Digital Reading Culture practitioners, the emphasis on affect is a way of connecting with other readers. Readers on bookish social media seem to be on a continual quest to find others who will have the same responses to the same passages from the same books. In her work on millennial fan cultures, Stein describes the forging of ‘a sense of an intimate collective’ (2015: 156) as an aspect that is characteristic of a digital media environment where each post can spawn a multitude of repostings and comments: ‘[F]eels culture thrives on the public celebration of emotions previously considered in the realm of the private. In feels culture, emotions remain intimate but are no longer necessarily private’ (Stein, 2015: 156). The accumulation, negotiation and communal validation of emotional responses also form an integral part of interactions in Digital Reading Culture. Crying is not just significant as an individual reaction to a book – the multitude of videos made by readers eager to test their own receptivity to works that have made others sob, such as A Little Life, shows that for them, a central function of reading is to share in a communal experience and conversation.

Once again, this is not in itself a wholly new phenomenon. Seen from a diachronic point of view, Stein’s analysis overstates the ‘privacy’ of emotion in earlier reading cultures. Many of the practices that make reading ‘social’ on social media – talking about reading experiences, exchanging recommendations, citing favourite passages, displaying one’s bookshelves – have been part of reading culture for centuries. ¹¹ In fact, ‘sense of an intimate collective’ seems a particularly fitting description of readerly interactions in the eighteenth-century ‘culture of sensibility’. Williams (2017) has traced the different ways in which eighteenth-century readers in general socialized around books, including the ‘continuing importance of shared reading’ (2017: 7). Readerly socializing included crying together: ‘Novels were celebrated for their ability to provoke tears within a reading circle’ (Williams, 2017: 214). Such performances did not necessarily entail the reading of a whole novel; it was also common to use compilations of excerpts from different works, which often featured sentimental scenes, since these ‘had the dual advantage of giving readers and listeners the chance to enjoy acute pathos, while also claiming to be morally improving’ (Williams, 2017: 215). In today’s online reading communities, excerpting and posting lists of favourite passages is also a popular pastime: not only do they indicate which works are deemed central to one’s individual life as a reader, but they also constitute a repository of texts that is seen as central to a shared experience. Rather than indicating that the perusal of whole books has been replaced by a reception of excerpts, these practices are characteristic of reading communities in which knowledge of the same books could be presupposed.

The eighteenth-century participation in the ‘theatre of feeling’ (Williams, 2017: 214–215) could be considered a test of one’s social integration. This is illustrated in a letter by one of the early readers of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, Lady Louisa Stewart: ‘I remember so well its first publication, my mother and sisters crying over it, dwelling upon it with rapture! And when I read it, as I was a girl of 14 not yet versed in sentiment, I had a secret dread I should not cry enough to gain the credit of proper sensibility’ (Partington, 1930: 237). ¹² Reflections on and negotiations of the adequate response to a book are also characteristic of Digital Reading Culture (though ‘proper’ is not a term that its practitioners would be likely to use). Very often readers on BookTok and BookTube position their own reception of a book in relation to that by others, thus delineating affinities and differences. Crying (or failing to cry) is a way of relating to other readers. At the same time, it is often seen as a comment on an arguably social quality of the book itself, namely the extent to which its characters are ‘relatable’ – another term that has gained a lot of traction on social media in recent years. The idea of ‘relatability’ complements and complicates the idea of receptivity (or, as already discussed in eighteenth-century terms, ‘sensibility’): in sharing ‘books that made me cry’, readers forge communities; in passing judgments on books, they also fashion versions of themselves in relation to others.

5. Acts of crying: Reading as a performance

Lady Louisa’s letter is also interesting in that it pits two seemingly incommensurable images of the crying reader against each other. On the one hand, for crying to prove the ‘sensibility’ of the reader, it needs to be seen as a spontaneous, involuntary reaction to the material that is being perused. On the other hand, ‘proper’ crying is represented as a skill that needs to be acquired: Lady Louisa’s mother and sisters know how it is done, but the fourteen-year-old is ‘not yet versed in sentiment’. The letter writer, looking back at her former self, apparently presents this contradiction for her reader’s amusement. She is clearly no longer part of the reading culture that her family was once so immersed in. What she implicitly presents as problematic (or at least somewhat ridiculous) is not only the focus on how readers feel about books, but also the desire to display such feelings on her own part, and the apparently skilled routine of doing precisely this on the part of the older women in her family.

In Digital Reading Culture, as in digital culture more generally, there prevails a similar notion that it is spontaneous reaction that should be seen as the ‘authentic’ gold standard. The fascination with immediate responses is epitomized in the format of the reaction video, a format that records responses to experiences that are unforeseen by those who are filmed, though sometimes anticipated by those operating the camera. Its apparent contradictions are neatly pinpointed by Davies (2023): ‘It is an infernal riddle of digital culture that ‘authenticity’ is constantly breeding its opposite: the ‘spontaneous’ event that proves to be no such thing, the ‘surprise’ that turns out to be staged, the emotional outburst that has been practiced’ (Davies, 2023). To a critic like Davies, the crying readers on BookTube or BookTok (if he came across them) might appear as particularly appalling examples: eagerly anticipating, and thus arguably inducing, a tearful reaction, as in the case of the Jack Edwards’ video; or theatrically staging and visibly relishing a bout of ugly crying, as in the TikTok example. In addition, approaching reading (as opposed to other activities) as a performance might cause unease because of the deeply engrained idea that serious reading is somehow antithetical to spectacle; that reading means to give full attention to the text rather than the environment surrounding the reader.

I would argue, however, that once one understands reading not just as the processing of content, but also – as laid out in the previous section – as a fundamentally social activity, such oppositions between the ‘authentic’ and the staged as well as between the interior and the exterior start to dissolve. This line of thinking is once again informed by Warhol’s already-quoted Having a Good Cry (2003) and its use of the concept of performance. In line with the idea of the ‘performative’ as used in speech act theory (not in the sense of pretending something that is not the case, but in the sense of bringing forth what it enacts), Warhol regards emotions themselves as having a strongly performative element. Following the nineteenth-century French philosopher François Delsarte, she suggests that rather than seeing expressions of feeling such as crying merely as outward manifestations of essentially inward emotion, we might also regard them as ‘bringing into being the emotional states they betoken’ (Warhol, 2003: 15).

To me, this seems a promising path for making sense of the significance that the act of crying holds both for the sentimental readers of the eighteenth century and for the practitioners of Digital Reading Culture. This is not to say that in these bookish cultures there is no concept of fake weeping. The example from David Simple denounces a case of phony crying, and in Digital Reading Culture, the very notion of ‘ugly crying’ as opposed to a tendency to ‘self-curate’, as it is celebrated in the article by Cote (2016), signals that there is a concept of ‘staging’ that has negative connotations. However, inspired by Warhol’s take on performance I propose going beyond any simple dichotomy of understanding a reader’s act of crying either as an expression of true feeling or as self-indulgent affectation. In the videos, crying is not just a reaction – it is an act of forging a reader’s relationship to that which is read and also to other readers. Whether such an act is regarded in a positive or negative light depends on finely calibrated norms and expectations within the particular reading community.

Many of the readers on BookTube and BookTok self-reflexively and playfully engage with the theatrical aspect of crying as performance: melodramatic poses are struck, responses to texts are willfully exaggerated. In the majority of cases, however, such hyperbole does not seem to be intended to depreciate crying as a response. In fact, I find myself reminded of a technique that Kim (2010) has described as typical of the sentimental novel, in particular Sarah Fielding’s work. He introduces the concept of ‘sentimental irony’ as a ‘rhetorical formation wherein sentimentality both generates and is generated by irony’ (Kim, 2010: 478), distinguishing it from the more common type of irony, which he dubs ‘satirical’: ‘whereas satirical irony exposes disjunctions between “appearance” and “reality” in order to provoke ridicule and assign moral blame, sentimental irony does so in order to highlight moral complexity, enunciate psychological principles, and generate pathos’ (Kim, 2010: 486). Digital Reading Culture is full of such uses of gentle irony, which acknowledge the indulgence of the crying reader without devaluing their response as such. Overall, the self-fashioning dimension of Digital Reading Culture feels culture, in being highlighted, is embraced as well as savoured.

6. Conclusion

The videos of and by crying readers on BookTube and BookTok show us a bookish culture that unapologetically emphasizes, even celebrates, the physical, social, and performative aspects of reading. It might seem at first glance that the second and the third aspect in particular are specific to the digital age, where reading is shared on ‘social’ media and practitioners become ‘curators’ of their own lives. As I have argued in this article, however, diachronic analysis shows that these aspects (or dimensions) have long been an integral part of everyday readers’ literary experiences. The differences lie in the more specific ways in which aspects of reading are communicated. What has rather dramatically changed, overall, is the scale and reach of the communal conversation around reading on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. Bookish social media, like the fan cultures that Stein writes about, are in the business of creating the ‘sense of an intimate collective’ (Stein, 2015: 256), but conversations on these platforms are shared far more widely than they would have been in a circle of family and friends in the eighteenth century. Moreover, in an online environment it may be much easier to acquire a peer group of like-minded readers, but in some ways the conversations around reading are more one-directional. I have argued that reading has always had an element of display, yet making and posting a video of one’s reading experience on a social media platform is not the same as talking or writing about it in a letter or discussing it in an analogue (i.e., non-digital) reading group. When the camera is always at hand, the logic of the platform – what is popular, what is marketable, what prompts one gets from other readers – does not merely influence the way in which reading experiences are talked about but becomes an inextricable part of these experiences themselves.

Another interesting difference concerns the cultural significance of readerly affect. In eighteenth-century culture, there seems to have been a brief moment (between the 1740s and the 1770s) in which tearful reading was not only popular with readers, but also taken seriously in philosophical discourse and used as a motor of aesthetic experiment by novelists (among them the already-mentioned Fielding and Richardson as well as Laurence Sterne). ¹³ The success of the crying reader on BookTok and BookTube, by contrast, is closely linked to its presentation as a bottom-up popular reading practice. The performance of tears often appears as part of the celebration of amateur reading and the rejection of gatekeeping practices that Murray (2018: 120) already described as characteristic of bookish platforms. Even though they can serve to highlight readers’ receptiveness to literary quality in ways that are not dissimilar to traditional literary criticism (e.g., when readers praise authors for their skillful representation of character or their insight into painful life experiences), they also often seem to either ignore or even openly defy such norms of ‘professional’ reading.

Another aspect that comes into view through the diachronic comparison between the two periods is the close link between the development of media formats and a grappling with the problem of ‘authentic’ representation. The discussion of Lady Bradshaigh’s recreation of Richardson’s ‘writing to the moment’ technique reveals a fascination with the idea that emerging formats like the epistolary novel could produce a sense of direct access to feeling and thereby also move the recipient. However, this fascination is not informed by a naïve belief in the transparency of representation. Eighteenth-century sentimental literature prompts the naïve recipient, like Fielding’s David Simple, to pay attention to representation as rhetoric and performance. Twenty-first-century social media afford users new ways of representing selves. Cover (2023) describes TikTok as ‘adopting […] an aesthetics of authenticity that is recognizable because it values the ordinary, individual and lived experience’ (2023: 161). This ‘aesthetics of authenticity’, however, is not to be equated with ‘real’ authenticity, which, as Cover argues with reference to Foucault, ‘escapes us, since the self is only knowable through the discourses and languages available to make sense of identity’ (Cover, 2023: 161). The successful evocation of authentic ‘everydayness’, then, is a moving target with evolving scripts. ¹⁴ The crying readers, whether in Lady Bradshaigh’s time or on BookTok, utilize such scripts to stage themselves as providing access to emotional experience that is supposed to look ‘unfiltered’. In the videos I have analysed we can see that practitioners are often aware of these acts of staging and self-fashioning – this becomes clear in the frequent moments of self-reflexive theatricality, which acknowledge the performance without devaluing it.

Studying Digital Reading Culture presents a series of methodological challenges. One is the dynamic character of the field, which is changing quickly and will probably already be quite different at the time this paper is published. Connected to this change is the shifting of functions within the different platforms in this quickly evolving media ecology, which could be pinpointed in analyses comparing BookTok and BookTube. As has already been mentioned, there are indications (see Reddan et al., 2024: 29; Martens et al., 2022: 714) that the ‘crying reader’ trend was fuelled by BookTok and its affordances specifically. I suspect that its prominence on BookTube is due to the influence of BookTok. However, proving this point would require larger-scale and more systematic corpus design and analysis. My approach in this article has gone in a different direction: while it may seem obvious that these digital phenomena call for the quantitative methods of the digital humanities, my aim was to show that a close reading of selected examples in the context of literary-historical developments can illuminate diachronic connections and nuances of meaning.

Since starting explorations into Digital Reading Culture some years ago, I have found that it is almost impossible to start a discussion (whether with students or with colleagues in literary studies) about BookTok or BookTube that does not trigger strong opinions about the dangers of social media. Like other scholars who are focusing on this field, I do my best to avoid the trap of deploring (or, conversely, idealising) the reading practices that I find on the platforms; I seek to understand where they come from and how they work, and to give an adequate sense of their complexity. In what ways social media will play a significant part in the future of literary reading practices remains to be seen. What seems clear to me (taking up the point made by Murray 2024) is that, if they want to keep having a relevant voice in the analysis of contemporary culture, literary scholars need to pay close attention to these developments and keep finding ways – both old and new – of engaging with them.