The Age of Influence: Edith Wharton’s Stories on Instagram Stories

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?