Abstract The following article outlines the rise in vox populi literary engagement and criticism on Instagram and TikTok, to explore and foster further conversation between academia and social media. A general overview of the literary phenomenon “Bookstagram” leads to a more specific project in which the author attempts to incite influencers to review Wharton’s short story “The Reckoning” (1902) on Instagram. A study of Wharton’s essay from 1903, “The Vice of Reading,” alongside detail from Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), provides a more theoretical take on the stories, reels, grids, book hauls, and #shelfies of Bookstagram. Can Wharton’s theory of “mechanical criticism,” alongside an understanding of what Veblen calls “conspicuous consumption,” be applied to content creators a century later, and what might such a discussion of readership and nonacademic criticism offer to wider questions of inclusion, the ethics of publishing, the canon, and literary engagement during end-stage capitalism?
H. J. E. Champion (Fri,) studied this question.