English Novels, Class, and Culture: Reading Colleen Hoover in Pakistan

Abstract

This research aims to explore the immense visibility of Colleen Hoover‘s novels in Pakistan and analyze the book retail, reading culture, and socio-economic class of the readers. Different bookstores and places, which include Urdu Bazar, Anarkali, Readings, and Variety, are visited and the popularity of Hoover‘s novels is witnessed. The stalls outside the Urdu Bazaar and in Anarkali Bazaar have her novels in a great variety. It Ends with Us, It Starts with Us, and Verity are at the top of the list of reader attractions. In Pakistan, the novels of Hoover are celebrating huge popularity among the youth as she writes romance novels that appeal to their interest. The questionnaire has been conducted to assure and find out what elements of Hoover‘s novels attract the readers most. For this purpose, a few open-ended questions are asked to share their views concerning the novels of Hoover. Besides field work, the corpus analysis of five novels: It Ends with Us, It Starts with Us, All Your Perfects, Reminders of Him and Verity, is done with the help of Voyant Tools. Jodi McAlister, an Australian academic and author has used Voyant Tools, an online digital humanities suite for corpus analysis in her article and it has allowed her to map and compare word frequency, use, typical phrases, and distinctive terminology. Voyant tools fall under ―digital humanities.‖ Through Voyant Tools, the analysis of large number of texts is easy and it is called distant-reading, Cirrus tool (frequent words), Summary tool (includes frequent words, distinctive words, document length), Reader (complete text), Trends (frequency of most occurring words) and Context tool (contexts of most frequent words) are some of the features of Voyant tools.