White supremacy on Goodreads: intertextuality and community management in reader reviews of The Swan Book

Abstract

Online book review platforms, such as Goodreads, are popular sites for readers to connect with other readers, and they enable researchers and professionals working in the publishing industry to gauge how readers respond to specific books. The Swan Book, first published in 2013 and written by Waanyi author Alexis Wright, is strongly influenced by Wright's positionality as a First Nations author. In this article, I study 197 reader reviews that have been posted to the Goodreads page of The Swan Book, and examine how readers enact or reject White supremacist approaches to literature in their reviews of the novel. To conduct this study, I completed close reading analysis of Goodreads reader reviews, drawing upon theoretical approaches from book history and critical Whiteness studies. In this article, I find that the formation of reader review communities, enabled by the deployment of intertextual references within the Goodreads review space, is key to how White supremacist review practices are supported or rejected by readers in their responses to The Swan Book.

Online review spaces, such as those on Goodreads, Amazon, or The Storygraph, are important data sources for researchers and publishing professionals to learn how a book has been received by its readers (Albrechtslund, 2019; Bourrier and Thelwall, 2020; Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo, 2019; English et al., 2023; Kousha et al., 2017; Matthews, 2016; Murray, 2019; Nakamura, 2013; Parnell and Driscoll, 2021; Stinson and Driscoll, 2020; Verboord, 2011; Walsh and Antoniak, 2021). These platforms are key locations upon which readers can share first-hand experiences of reading books, communicate with other readers, negotiate and debate acceptable or non-acceptable uses of genre terms, and place their own review of a book into conversation with other reviews to demonstrate a consensus (or not) of reader responses. However, an important factor in the study of online book spaces is a recognition that online platforms can, and often do, elevate Whiteness ¹ and perpetuate racial discrimination (Parnell, 2021). As Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo write, ‘it is important to recognise the tenacity of whiteness in online spaces and the persistence of structural racism’ which is embedded within platform environments, and to take this into consideration whenever scholars turn their attention to the role that online book spaces play in the publishing ecosystem (2023: 43). Readers on Goodreads use intertextual references to situate their review within a community of reviewers (Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo, 2019: 255), and in this article I examine how reader review communities on the Goodreads page of The Swan Book support, or push back against, White supremacist approaches to literary quality.

Book reviews from professional and industry reviewers, as well as everyday readers, play an important role in the promotion of books to readers. Phillipa K. Chong draws upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1993) in her study of book review practices, and writes that professional reviewers do work as cultural consecrators who convey to the public ‘which books are worth knowing about – and which are not’ (2020: 4). It is, consequently, important to note that professional and industry book reviewing practices often disproportionately promote White authors (see, for example: So, 2021: 69–71). Alexandra Dane, in her work on the influence of White supremacy upon the publishing industry, argues that ‘the continuing practice of book reviewing affords White authors not only more opportunities to attract critical attention but more power to define and influence the parameters of literary understanding’ (2023: 22). These same practices can be seen in online reviews by everyday readers which are posted to Goodreads or to Amazon. There has been significant research which demonstrates that racism is present in book review spaces online, a finding which is notable yet unsurprising given the ubiquity of racist discourses in online spaces more broadly, for example the practice of ideologically driven review bombing employed by the alt-right (Cantone et al., 2024; Letizi and Norman, 2024), or the example of Cait Corrain who anonymously targeted the Goodreads review pages of other debut authors by posting one-star reviews, with a disproportionate focus on authors of colour (Story, 2023). Imogen Mathew examines Amazon and Goodreads reviews of Am I Black Enough for You? by Wiradjuri author Anita Heiss and identifies the emergence of what she terms ‘not reading’ practices in which readers explicitly or impliedly assert that they have not read a book within their review criticising its content, writing, as an example: ‘As a clear caveat up front, please note that I have not read this book, nor do I intend to’ (review quoted in Mathew, 2016: 76). Jordan et al. study examples of disinformation about the ‘threat’ of critical race theory in the Amazon book reviews of four books commonly cited by Republican politicians in the United States as promoting critical race theory. They emphasise that ‘understanding how whiteness and disinformation intertwine in digital spaces is crucial’ to be able to combat ignorance and disinformation (Jordan et al., 2024: 84). Websites which solicit book reviews from the broader public create opportunities for race-motivated review bombing of texts by First Nations authors (Mathew, 2016), and White supremacy emerges in reviews not only through overtly racist one-star reviews but also in more subtle ways. My research builds upon the work of the above scholars by examining how reviewers signal their presence, and therefore their authority, within review communities. These signals add weight and legitimacy to review responses which promote White supremacist approaches to novels authored by First Nations writers. Understanding how White supremacy emerges within book reviews and book culture is vital because these are not just places in which White supremacist discourses and logics are visible, but they are moreover locations which actively promote and support White supremacy.

White supremacy is the presumption that Whiteness and White traditions of work are inherently superior. White supremacy can present itself overtly within discourses which are explicitly racist, but also more subtly in the idea that White supremacist logics are natural and neutral, rather than a consequence of racist imperial and colonial histories. As Liu et al. argue, it ‘is therefore not just a way of seeing race but a fundamental way in which our world has been structured’ (2021: 106). White supremacy is a system of domination upheld and maintained via cultural discourses which treat it as an inherent and uncontested structural system, and which legitimatises ‘some knowledges, experiences and voices at the expense of others’ (Hunter and Westhuizen, 2021). White supremacy is colonial and patriarchal, and because it is so engrained within culture and society broadly, it can become invisible, particularly to those who benefit from it (Moreton-Robinson, 2020: 111; Nayak, 2007: 744–745); and this is the case even as it ‘surreptitiously shapes social relations and economic development’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 66). As such, readers can promote White supremacist approaches to literary quality in their reviews even if they are not consciously aware they are doing so. If someone who is engaging in bookish spaces is not deliberately working to counter White supremacist approaches then there is a high likelihood they will promote them because of how embedded this system is within Western society and culture.

In this article, I begin in the next section by outlining the methodological approach I took in my research for this article. I then introduce key considerations that must be taken into account when studying online reader reviews. I provide an overview of the Goodreads platform and the key demographics of its users, and I flag that reviews posted by readers onto Goodreads are shaped by the commercialisation and commodification of the platform. I then examine the influence of White supremacy on bookish spaces, and provide an introduction to how intertextuality is deployed by readers in online spaces to form communities of readers. In the following section, I introduce my case study for this article, The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, I provide an overview of key elements of its plot, and I introduce two other articles which have also analysed Goodreads reader reviews of The Swan Book. I then progress my examination of how White supremacy emerges within the Goodreads reader reviews of The Swan Book and demonstrate how readers use intertextual references to show both their embeddedness within the review community and to promote responses to the novel which are grounded within White supremacist approaches to literary quality. Finally, I demonstrate how other reader reviews utilise similar intertextual techniques, but instead participate in community management to push back against these reviews which have promoted White supremacist approaches to literature, and how they instead promote positive interactions with the novel in the provision of guides for readers who have come to the review section for assistance in managing the challenges of reading the novel.

Methods

The methods for this research involved a close reading analysis of reader reviews posted to the Goodreads page of The Swan Book. This dataset consists of 197 Goodreads reviews which I scraped on 5 January 2024 using Octoparse (Octopus Data inc., 2023). This data scrape gathered the entire corpus of reviews of The Swan Book that had been posted to the website on that date, minus three non-English language reviews which I removed from the dataset. This scraping method has been similarly applied to Goodreads by Claire Parnell and Beth Driscoll who used OutWit Hub, a scraper which works along similar lines to Octoparse (2021: 4). While the authors of the reviews I scraped from Goodreads have published their reviews to the public alongside their names onto the Goodreads platform, these reviews are also situated in a context in which their review is one amongst thousands. By removing the reviews from this context and isolating them for individual analysis, I place a greater analytic focus upon them than was, likely, ever intended by their authors. As such, I have not included names or citations for the Goodreads reviews I draw upon in this article and have assigned each review a number from 1 to 197, to anonymise them as much as possible. I made this decision drawing upon the ethical guidelines published by the Association of Internet Research (Franzke et al., 2020). As these reviews are publicly available data, a formal ethics process was not undertaken.

The dataset of Goodreads reviews is sufficiently small that I was able to read the dataset in its entirety multiple times, and I coded them as I went looking in particular for phrases which repeated over multiple reviews, reviews which referred explicitly to other reviews, reviews which were overtly or subtly racist, reviews which promoted, or alternately rejected, White supremacist approaches to literary quality in how they critiqued The Swan Book, and reviews which made intertextual references to the Goodreads review community. As Graham Allen writes in the opening pages of the second edition of Intertextuality, ‘acts of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations’ (Allen, 2011: 1). As such, I focused my attention on reviews which gained greater significance or meaning when read alongside the other reviews in the corpus, and reviews which drew particular attention to the fact that these reviews sat alongside other reviews. I then completed a close reading analysis of these reviews, drawing upon a combination of theoretical approaches from book history and critical Whiteness studies. Close reading analysis has been applied to Goodreads reviews in other studies of the review site, often combined with other methods such as sentiment analysis to aid in the study of datasets larger than the one I use here (Bourrier and Thelwall, 2020; Driscoll, 2016; Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo, 2019; Stinson and Driscoll, 2020).

Considerations when studying online book reviews

Online review platforms dedicated to books and readers, such as Goodreads, are a source of information about how readers reflect on books, and do not have the same barriers to entry that exist in other book culture spaces, such as reviews published in the media, or the judgements of literary prizes. The relevance of drawing upon reviews authored by everyday readers, as distinct from those written by literary critics or researchers, is articulated by Sandra R. Phillips, who writes that everyday readers ‘are people who choose to read as part of their daily lives,’ and, as such, they are to whom we must turn to understand the work that books actually do in the world (Phillips, 2012: 186). Goodreads is a highly used tool for readers who are looking to discover books. In their study of readers conducted in 2020, Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo found that 56% of their surveyed readers used social media to discover new books, and of these Goodreads was the second most cited source for those readers (30%), sitting just behind Facebook which was used by 35% of those readers (2023: 22–23). Nevertheless, while these websites may allow for ‘equal participation in literary culture and the confrontation of existing cultural hierarchies’ (Albrechtslund, 2019: 13), the users of Goodreads, though consisting of about 75% women, are still largely White, middle-class, and from educated backgrounds (Murray, 2019: 9; Thelwall and Kousha, 2017: 978), Goodreads’ popularity is, as such, an example of ‘new middlebrow culture’ (Driscoll, 2014). The high percentage of women who use Goodreads may also impact reviews and ratings on the platform, as readers will often give more favourable ratings to books written by authors of the same gender as themselves (Thelwall, 2019: 410). Nevertheless, as noted by Lisa Nakamura, while Goodreads can be seen as an ‘amazing tool, a utopia for readers,’ in using the website to display their ‘readerliness’ users have become objects to be collected by both Goodreads and its other commercial partners (Nakamura, 2013: 241); and this is only more applicable since Goodreads was acquired by Amazon in 2013.

While Goodreads provides an opportunity for readers to participate in book culture, in doing so readers also participate in Amazon's commercialisation and commodification of their reading experience. As Simone Murray writes, ‘delving between Goodreads’ rhetoric of book-loving community reveals a business model based primarily on dual revenue streams of advertising and data licencing’ (2019: 9); as such, she continues, ‘highly emotional discourse, even when it is explicitly conflictual … is commercially beneficial in that it encourages users to prolong their involvement with the site’ (2019: 11). This commodification of the reading experience has the consequence that readers can be rewarded for reviews which are popular or provocative, such as with likes or comments, or conversely, reviewers may be hesitant to post a review when they have not had a positive experience reading a book to avoid backlash. As such, while book reviews posted to the Goodreads website are a useful source to draw upon when seeking to understand how a book has been responded to by readers, these reviews are shaped by the various processes of commercialisation and commodification practiced by Goodreads and Amazon.

Reader review communities emerge on Goodreads through readers’ use of intertextual references to other reviews within their own. The theory of intertextuality ‘captures the idea that all texts and conversations … are linked to other texts and conversations … and that people, through making and interpreting such links, create and infer meanings’ (Gordon, 2023: 2). Intertextuality is found throughout online discourses, and in online review spaces intertextual practices can position the reviewer as a member of that review community (Chen and Zhu, 2021; Vásquez, 2015: 69). Goodreads reviews, and indeed most forms of written communication, cannot be properly understood without regard to the intertextual references made within them. This is articulated by Allen who writes that: ‘meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations’ (2011: 1). While intertextual references can be explicit, such as in the phrase ‘I read in another review…’ they are also visible in the use of the second person ‘you’ when the reviewer directly addresses other members of that review community, a review technique frequently employed by Goodreads users (Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo, 2019: 254), and in the presence of specific and repeated words or phrases which appear throughout that review space. The intertextual references readers make in online reader reviews are one way in which readers adopt a readerly identity. As Driscoll writes in What Readers Do, ‘the identity of the reader is not fixed, but is enacted through variable practices … [and is] inflected by their other relations and identities’ (Driscoll, 2024: 35). Readers’ identities as readers can find expression not just through reading but also through activities, such as participation in online reader communities on the Goodreads platform.

Intertextual references and White supremacy in Goodreads reviews of The Swan Book

The case study for this article is The Swan Book by Alexis Wright. Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The Swan Book was first published in 2013 by Giramondo Press (Wright, 2013), and won and was shortlisted for a number of significant Australian literary prizes. It won the ALS Gold Medal in 2014 and the Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2016, and was shortlisted for four other prizes including the Miles Franklin and the Stella Prize. The Swan Book tells the story of a girl, Oblivia, in a future Australia in which the world has been ravaged by climate change. Oblivia lives in an Aboriginal community on a swamp named Swan Lake, with Bella Donna, a European refugee who found Oblivia where she had been hiding for ten years in a tree after she was gang-raped by a group of boys high on petrol fumes. Oblivia is mute but forms a connection with the black swans who have come to live in the swamp and who give Swan Lake its name. As the novel progresses, Oblivia is married to Warren Finch, who shortly thereafter becomes the First Aboriginal President of Australia. Oblivia is taken by him, unwillingly, from her home to an unnamed city in the south to live, and she is later implicated in his assassination. Eventually Oblivia returns to her home, trekking north across Australia amongst refugees fleeing catastrophic floods. The swans return with her as she makes the journey, though only one survives. Wright describes how she aims with her writing ‘to develop a literature more suited to the powerful, ancient cultural landscape of this country’ (Wright, 2019); and in The Swan Book Wright draws upon both Western mythology and First Nations story and culture. For example, Wright cites Pablo Neruda, Charles Baudelaire, and the Gubbi Gubbi and Jinibara peoples of the Sunshine Coast of Queensland as sources of swan stories she drew upon in her writing process for the novel (Wright, 2020).

Emmett Stinson and Beth Driscoll have studied a sample of the Goodreads reviews of The Swan Book to examine how readers engaged with the difficulty of the novel in their Goodreads reviews. They found that readers who reference the novel's difficulty fall into two categories: critical reviews, and post-critical reviews. ² They note that ‘commenting on the difficulty of a book, specifically, allows readers to position themselves in relation to perceived academic and professional standards: either embracing these, or disavowing and protecting the reviewer from being judged in relation to them’ (Stinson and Driscoll, 2020: 15). Lucy Neave examines how American readers respond to the transnational themes of the novel. In her analysis, she finds that the reviews ‘appear polarised between readers who found the novel hard to comprehend and engage with, and those who felt the novel had marked epistemological value’ (Neave, 2024: 41), and that while the novel emphasises transnational Indigenous connections, readers ‘predominantly focused on the novel as being about Australian Aboriginal people; [and] vernacular reviews predominantly concentrated on challenges posed by the novel's form’ (Neave, 2024: 47). While how readers engage with the difficulty of the novel is relevant for my examination of how readers use Goodreads as a location to help guide others as one aspect of community management, in this article I use the Goodreads reviews of The Swan Book to examine how readers use intertextual references to indicate their embeddedness within the review community, and how this shapes readers’ responses to reviews which promote White supremacist logics.

White supremacist logics emerge throughout reader reviews of The Swan Book, for example in the use of outdated or racist language. This is visible in the eight (4%) reviews which use the word ‘Aborigine’ or ‘Aborigines’ to refer to Aboriginal people. ‘Aborigine(s)’ is an outdated colonial term which homogenises diverse Peoples into a singular collective (as an example, the Aborigines Protection Acts were legislative acts which, amongst other harms, provided the legal framework for First Nations children to be stolen from their families). These reviews use the term as if it were respectful even when writing a negative review, for example: ‘I wish I could say I liked the book, but I think I just appreciated/respected what the book is clearly trying to talk about (e.g. Australia and its history of being *the worst* with the Aborigines …)’ (review 24). The use of ‘Aborigine(s)’ within Goodreads reviews could be indicative of reader ignorance regarding appropriate language to use when referring to First Nations peoples, particularly given the international audience The Swan Book achieved, but it is also reflective of broader trends in the language choices readers make when reviewing books by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors (Dutton, 2022; Fuller, 2020: 316). The growth in popularity of online book spaces, such as Goodreads ‘demonstrates a shift in power whereby readers now have the capacity to influence the publishing industry and book culture through their reviewing and rating practices’ (Driscoll, 2024: 55). As such, reviews which espouse or support responses to the novel which are grounded in White supremacist attitudes can bolster processes within publishing which already privilege Whiteness.

Readers on Goodreads use intertextual references to signal their position within the review community. Their position within this community adds consequence to reviews which privilege Whiteness and White traditions of reading and writing, as it emphasises that it is not an individual opinion but a community response. This emerges in the repeated use of ‘purple prose’ in the below reviews:

I really wanted to love this book. It has all the elements I'm interested in, but the writing is just terrible. I've noticed since moving to Northern Australia that a lot of people up here only read a few words from every sentence, and assume that they know what comes in between. This book is written in that way. If you just skim the words, you get a feel for what the author's trying to say. If you actually read all of the words, you find that they're often the opposite of the author's intended meaning. If you're going to go with purple prose, it pays to have a much more solid grip on the English language than this. (review 11)

It's as if another language is being spoken. You can't follow the trail of thought… the plot… the point, really. I saw a reference to purple prose in other reviews and I had to look up its meaning. I can say this description is accurate. I would have loved to have read the book described in the plot summary. But, what I got was a word salad that just couldn't satisfy me. (review 118)

This just didn't work for me at all. It's a combination of the rambling purple prose, the minimal plot, and losing interest in the characters very early on in the book. (review 21)

Sadly I have had to do something which I usually feel is sacrilegious after committing oneself to a book, and that is putting it down unfinished. … I get what Wright wanted to do here, she wanted to write a “difficult” novel. But after 60 or 70 pages of no story, no characters to care for, no worthy or meaningful dialogue, it just turns into a dull turgid mess of pretentious purple prose. (review 63)

In these reviews, the reviewers include intertextual references to other reviews of The Swan Book posted to its Goodreads page. These intertextual references are made explicitly in the case of the reviewer who writes that they discovered the term ‘purple prose’ in other reviews (very likely other Goodreads reviews), ³ but the repeated use of the phrase even in reviews which are not as explicit, is indicative of community formation around this shared response to the text and functions as an intertextual reference. In using ‘purple prose,’ these reviewers indicate that their response is not an outlier, but a shared, legitimate, and fair response based in knowledge of what constitutes good written expression. Of course, this dismissal of The Swan Book as, for example, ‘a dull turgid mess of pretentious purple prose’ (review 63), is a response which is grounded in White supremacy. In The Swan Book, Wright presents a narrative to the reader which combines First Nations knowledges and story structure, Waanyi words, with references to European mythology, and which is influenced by styles of writing used by James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, and Carlos Fuentes (Azam, 2014). The Swan Book, as such, not only demonstrates Wright's mastery of Western styles of writing, but invites the reader to experience the expansion of these styles into a novel which is explicitly First Nations centred. In their use of ‘purple prose,’ these readers suggest that Wright has prioritised trying to sound intelligent over being comprehensible, but The Swan Book is not a novel meant to be easily digestible to a reader who has only experienced Western styles of written expression. Rather, readers must be open to doing the interpretive work to understand the narrative.

What is further notable in these four reviews is their repetition that the reviewer understood Wright's intention, she just expressed herself badly. These responses are both patronising and privileging of Western traditions. ‘If you actually read all of the words, you find that they're often the opposite of the author's intended meaning’ (review 11), and ‘I get what Wright wanted to do here, she wanted to write a ‘difficult’ novel’ (review 63). These reviewers position themselves as authorities on both The Swan Book and literary quality, and suggest that Wright not only did not understand how to craft a novel but that she did not understand the meaning of the very words she was writing. That The Swan Book is a challenging book to read is undoubtedly true, Wright herself writes that ‘If my books feel uncomfortable, threatening, or too edgy and too challenging as some have claimed, well good, I have done my job’ (2019). How readers respond to the difficulty of The Swan Book is explored by Stinson and Driscoll (2020), and indeed 93 (47%) of the reviews on Goodreads include readers’ reflections upon how they grappled with the novel's difficulty themselves. However, this trend of dismissing the novel as bad writing when rather it is expressive of different traditions is a form of White supremacy. These reviewers, in their emphasis that their response is one shared by others, form a community in which their perspective forms just one of many, and by situating their reviews in this way, they add legitimacy to their claims that The Swan Book is written badly, and they draw upon Western ideals of what constitutes good writing in attempts to substantiate their position.

‘I’m not racist! But…’ ‘There should be more First Nations literature! But not this one’

Racialised language emerges throughout the Goodreads reviews of The Swan Book, particularly in reviews which I refer to as, with a nod to humour, the ‘I’m not racist! But…’ reviews. These reviews lament the lack of First Nations literature in Australia, but also dismiss The Swan Book as poorly written because it does not conform precisely to traditional Anglophone literary styles. These reviews are indicative of how reading can be perceived as a moral activity, a phenomenon observed and analysed by Driscoll (2024), but also why, as Merina Dutton notes, ‘settlers choosing books pertaining to race or racism ought to be careful about subjecting Black stories to the white gaze – or totally missing the point of the story’ (2022: 318–319). In their reviews, these readers position themselves as advocates for First Nations authors – and therefore moral readers who are supportive of authors under-represented in the Anglophone publishing industry – but use this positioning to support their claim that The Swan Book is poorly written. In these reviews, community formation emerges in the intertextual references these reviewers include to their own hypothetical reader:

The reader should have felt that the story impacted them in some way, shape or form - yet I was left thinking of the author as somewhat pretentious and the book as a waste of time. If you are looking for an Australian novel to read, I feel that there are plenty out there better worth the time and money spent on this book, which is sad considering the severe lack of Indigenous presence and perspective in Australian literature. (review 5)

I think I’m an outlier in my opinion of this book, so I won’t say much. … I like my magic realism and dystopian novels, and the idea of a dystopian society resulting from the Howard-era Aboriginal Intervention is a promising one, but this book is pointless, poorly-written drivel. (review 70)

I kept thinking the problem was mine and I should just keep on going and I would eventually find it rewarding, but no. It's the kind of thing I thought I would like: an indigenous perspective on a dystopian near future Australia, but I thought the writing was just horrible. In the interests of fairness for anyone else who might be interested in writing from acclaimed Indigenous Australian writers, here is a glowing review from the Sydney Review of Books: http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/going-. (review 175)

These reviewers suggest that they would have liked to read about First Nations themes, but the style with which Wright writes those stories, a style which is strongly influenced by her identity as a member of the Waanyi nation, is not sufficiently to their liking. These reviewers find fault with Wright rather than with themselves in an attitude which expresses itself defensively. This framing privileges White ways of reading by suggesting that there is a correct, and incorrect, way in which First Nations authors must write if they are to communicate First Nations issues to a (presumed) White readership, and that Wright has failed to meet this standard.

What emerges too in these reviews is an acknowledgment that their response is in the minority, an awareness which stems from their engagement with the review community. This can be seen in: ‘I think I’m an outlier in my opinion of this book’ (review 70) and ‘In the interests of fairness … here is a glowing review from the Sydney Review of Books’ (review 175). That these reviewers position themselves as the exception rather than the rule accords with common online reviewing practices observed by Vásquez: ‘More reviewers go ‘on record’ as agreeing (e.g. I agree with …) than as disagreeing,’ and reviewers who disagree are more likely to use a sentence construction which ‘acknowledges the uniqueness of consumer experiences, and the inherent subjectivity involved in their own evaluation’ (2015: 70); for example by writing ‘I think I’m an outlier’ (review 70) and ‘In the interests of fairness’ (review 175). While the racial identity of these reviewers is unknown, this anticipatory defensiveness is reminiscent of an emotional technique White people deploy when confronted with their own use of White supremacist logics: ‘emotions, such as anger, defensiveness, denial, guilt, and sadness, serve to either deflect or distance the feeler from the topic, thereby shutting down dialogue and denying the pain and violence of racialized people’ (Jordan et al., 2024: 73). In their defensive emphasis that their review is just their own subjective experience of reading The Swan Book, these reviewers distance themselves from the White supremacist logics they have deployed in their insistence that there should be, the implication is, more books about First Nations themes which are crafted in a style which caters to White traditions, rather than to First Nations ones. These reviewers presume the reader of their review encounters it within the context of the Goodreads review page for The Swan Book, and so they draw attention to the fact that their review does not concur with the majority opinion espoused by other reviews within that review community. The attention which they draw to the positionality of their review within the review space further emphasises their enmeshment within the review community, which adds greater authority to their review.

Community management in the online review space: pushing back

While the review space is a location for White supremacy to emerge, it is equally a location for readers to push back against White supremacist approaches to evaluation of literary merit, making it clear that these types of review practices are not welcome within this review community. These reviews position their own review as in-conversation with the other reviews posted onto The Swan Book's Goodreads page. While community management of the review space can include more subtle practices as I elaborate upon below, this type of community management is also very explicitly stated in the following Goodreads review which includes a quote, ‘word salad,’ from review 118 which I quote above:

[The Swan Book] also clearly has a lens on it that is very Indigenous/Australian Aboriginal and therefore probably not what most of us (white folks and Americans) are used to reading. It might take more focus than we are used to giving our fiction. This is no beach read. That does not, by any means, make it a bad book or a word salad … to call it a mess and write it off with one star ratings when your dislike is clearly tied to white expectations of your world view being reflected, is white supremacy at work. It's the expectation that everything will be written with the white world view and white ease/comfort in mind. (review 165)

This reviewer demonstrates the intertextual awareness that reviewers on platforms like Goodreads bring to their reviewing practices, responding not just to the text but also to how the text has been engaged with within the review space. Their review focuses on management of the Goodreads review community and draws clear lines of demarcation between acceptable and unacceptable review practices. Other reviews which, while being less explicit about their intentions, also participate in this type of community management are the following. These reviews speak back to the above reviews, grounded in White supremacist approaches to literature, and model other ways of interpreting the difficulty of The Swan Book:

Wright's stories are firmly rooted in First Nations experiences, and I don’t think that she is deliberately trying to make it hard for the reader. It's just that this is the story she is telling and the perspective from which she is writing. And surely white Australia owes First Nations the respect and dignity that goes with just listening? (review 113)

I feel like this book made me feel white and dumb, AS IT SHOULD. (review 54)

Because The Swan Book is not an easy novel, it is not for hasty readers who rush through stories and never stop to think about what they've just read. It may not be for everyone, because it has been written for thinking adults. (review 15)

While these readers do not explicitly address other reviewers, they do speak back to themes which emerge within other reviews posted onto The Swan Book's Goodreads page. As White supremacy and the privileging of White ways of reading are so embedded within literary culture, they can become invisible to those who are also embedded within White culture. In drawing attention to these White supremacist practices within reviews, these reviewers make these practices more visible to others and denounce their presence in the review space. This creates clear delineations for others to discover when they, in turn, participate in the review community by reading others’ reviews. In drawing explicit attention to the presence of White supremacy within a number of the reviews critical of The Swan Book, they also undermine some of the neutrality which can be weaponised by White supremacy, this perceived neutrality allows it to simmer along unchecked because it is a subtle expression of racial bias rather than an overt one.

Reviews as a guide for readers

A final method of community management emerges within Goodreads reviews of The Swan Book when readers use the platform as a location to request or provide assistance in grappling with the novel's difficulty. Stinson and Driscoll note that ‘the difficulty of The Swan Book becomes an interpretive challenge for this reading community, which produces a rhetorical mode of “readers helping readers”’ (Stinson and Driscoll, 2020: 15). Unlike the reviews grounded within White supremacist discourses, these reviews foster positive engagements with the text, acknowledging that interpreting or understanding The Swan Book might be too challenging for readers to tackle on their own, and so they turn towards the review space as a site for assistance. That the Goodreads review community can be a site for pedagogy and learning is visible in both positive and negative reviews:

I read somewhere that Wright was also inspired by William Faulkner who I love because underlying his stream-of-consciousness writing is a strong sense of character which this book lacked. … I'd love to find a detailed review or analysis that “explains” this book but so far all I've found a very general comments about climate change and politics that don't tell me more than I already know. (review 62)

Having read 3 reviews to elucidate what was happening I think this novel is trying to do a lot of things. … (review 167)

When I just began this book I read a review here that said “This is one of those books that teaches you how to read them, and I am a slow learner.” I am so glad I stumbled across that perfectly-said line, because the slow way this one unfolds and the rhythm it takes is very special, even if its form is challenging. (review 116)

These reviews report how they turned to the review space for assistance in understanding what they have read. Reviewers can also provide guidance for how others might approach reading The Swan Book. These can include strategies such as: which format makes the text most accessible, comparisons to other authors who write in a similar style so readers can shape their expectations, and encouragement that perseverance with the novel is worthwhile. For example:

I have no idea how I feel about this book. I tried to physically read it but just could not get into it. I looked up the reviews and found that a lot of people were saying that this is the type of book you need to read for the feeling not looking for meaning in every line. I switched to the audiobook version as I am not someone who can lightly read anything … The written version has italics for speech and odd paragraph breaks and chapters that are incredibly different sizes, and the audiobook made it all way easier to engage with. I think I would recommend this novel to fellow Australians, with the audiobook as accompaniment. (review 112)

I kept thinking of James Joyce's Ulysses as I read: it has the promise of the same kind of riches that reveal themselves the more times you read it. (review 9)

I have seen comparisons to Joyce here, and that rings a little true. James Joyce never held me in thrall, always leaving me slightly resentful at the work he expects from his readers. This book never left me feeling like that, but it did leave me apathetic and feeling a little left behind. (review 171)

Keep persevering if you're struggling through The Swan, it is worth it in the end. (review 178)

These reviews demonstrate the frequency with which intertextual references emerge within Goodreads reviews, reviewers frequently use their reviews to address other readers in the review community. Reviews are firmly situated as one among many in the review space, and so their meaning can only be properly understood when considered as part of a whole. These reviewers use their position as member of the review community to assist other community members to successfully engage with The Swan Book in a positive way, providing readers a guide to follow if/when they seek assistance.

Conclusion

As both the publishing industry and the review space are grounded within logics of White supremacy which privilege traditionally Western and Anglophone ways of reading and writing, these logics emerge within Goodreads reviews and are supported by the use of intertextual references and community formation present within the review space. While individual online reviews on Goodreads might emphasise that their review is theirs alone, and might not accord with the experiences others have had of the novel, the deployment of intertextual references throughout the review space emphasises that these responses are not isolated, but shared. White supremacy interweaves the responses that readers have to The Swan Book, and it shapes critiques which interpret the novel's grounding in First Nations knowledges and traditions as bad writing, rather than as constitutive of ways of writing which do not centralise Whiteness. Understanding how White supremacist discourses are perpetuated within online review spaces is important because of the influence that platforms can have upon how books are understood to have been received by their readers. What becomes clear from my analysis of reviews of The Swan Book is that review communities use intertextual references to bolster their own responses to the novel. This is the case, certainly, when these responses are grounded in White supremacist approaches to literature, but these techniques of community formation are equally visible in reviews which explicitly reject those approaches, as well as reviews which promote more positive strategies for how readers can approach The Swan Book if they are struggling to understand Wright's work. While in my corpus of reviews there are 197 unique responses that readers have had to the novel, none of these reviews sit in isolation from the others on the platform. Rather, they sit alongside each other, forming communities of responses which can either accept, or reject, White supremacist approaches to literary quality.