Crisis Time and Rereading

This chapter draws on ethnographic evidence of readers revisiting favourite texts in 2020 to suggest that times of crisis might be characterised by the practices of rereading as much as by the demand for novelty, survival manuals, or news. Engaging with a range of academic arguments for and against the affordances of rereading, we suggest that it is crucial to see the activity as one defined, in times of crisis, by context. Not only, we show, do new experiences of danger and crisis play into the desire for familiar texts but also diverse media formats and forms of experience make these old texts new in ways that we might not expect.