When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century examines how social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit transformed the use, circulation, and reception of historical literature in the new millennium. By drawing on large-scale social media data, qualitative interviews, close reading, and archival research, I show how these platforms enabled ordinary readers and individuals—not just publishers and scholars—to widely redistribute older print literary works and to repurpose them toward new social, political, and economic ends.

To tell this story, I focus on the reception histories of five influential post-1945 American authors—James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Sandra Cisneros, Chris Kraus, and David Foster Wallace—whose works, years and even decades after their initial print publication, were championed by communities on the internet and social media. Across various digital platforms, thousands of internet users condensed, transformed, and inserted their literary works into new contexts, often in support of progressive political movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too, but sometimes in support of reactionary agendas like those of Russian trolls and misogynists (and sometimes both—for example, James Baldwin’s words were reshared by real BLM supporters and by a confirmed Russian troll farm account, as I show in my first chapter). While in some cases, these textual transformations amplified the original meanings of the texts, in other cases, they clearly deviated from them, veering toward misquotation, misinterpretation, and misinformation. By tracing the digital recirculation of these literary works, my study offers not only a reception history of five iconic authors and an argument about how contemporary readers engage with literature, but also a new perspective on information sharing in online environments that is relevant for humanists and information scientists alike.