Confined to Care: Reading Autofiction During the Covid-19 Lockdowns

This article draws on a study conducted in the last half of 2020, into the ways in which pandemic has affected the habits of readers in Denmark and the UK. Here we focus on just one phenomenon to emerge from that study: the popularity amongst Danish parents of fictions that address and enact the very situation of care in which they have found themselves. With the recent Danish novel, Olga Ravn’s Mit Arbejde in focus, we suggest that this literary representation of a new mother’s cyclical relation to time has helped readers process their own lockdown experience. Our case rests, however, less on the mimetic relation of the novel to life, than on the point that even when the the novel suggests this correspondence, reading itself involves a certain forward movement, as well as the making of time for oneself.