On rereading The Age of Innocence and feeling my old familiar tenderness for Newland Archer, it struck me that he bore the same last name as Henry James's Isabel Archer. I knew immediately that I wanted to bring these two characters together. So I contrived a meeting that would reshape the destiny of each.
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 speciic project in which the author attempts to incite influencers to review Wharton's short story "The Reckoning" (1902) on Study of Institutions (1899), provides a more theoretical take on the stories, "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?
