Introduction. Digital literature’s background
The dissemination of literary works has always been the main objective of writers, who created them in order to spread their thoughts to the widest possible audience, from medieval minstrels to today’s booktubers. Although it is true that literary conversation has always been one of the phenomena that has revolved around the socialisation of literature, it is also true that its role has never been so decisive. Social networks have changed the way humans interact. Consequently, the link between the reader and the literary text has been modified by the intermediation of one of these networks, the digital network, which has changed not only the relationship with the text but the text itself above all (Cassany, 2012; Cerrillo & Senís, 2005).
The concept of digital literature is relatively new and is associated with the concept of multimodality, hypertextuality and intertextuality (Landow, 2009), despite the fact that some of the genres linked thereto are not so linked actually. Fanfiction for instance is rooted in the last century as a result of the expansion and diffusion of science fiction, both in the literature sphere and in the film industry. Undoubtedly, the recreation of texts from other texts and the hypertextual link between them is a phenomenon as old as literature itself. In this sense, the Electronic literature directory1 reviews some titles that could well have been conceived as genuine hypertextual works: from Alice in Wonderland (Falguera, 2019) to French avant-garde poetry. Other phenomena related to digital literature, such as Booktubers or Storytelling, could also be traced back to antiquity and the oral transmission of literary texts. It should be made clear that these phenomena are not digital literature strictly speaking, just as any literary conversation is not literature, but social phenomena and the dissemination of literature.
Despite this –let us say- background, it is clear that the way the message is disseminated, even the nature of the message itself, changes radically with the emergence of networked literature at the beginning of the 21st century. The form, channel, code and format of literature made through social media vary substantially from traditional forms of literature. The very nature of the literary text and its link to the reader is modified through the aforementioned networks. Therefore, reading becomes a creative activity whereby subjective interpretation of the text entails a process of appropriation of the text itself (Chartier, 2007). This process may involve a community of readers or social groups that share a collective subjective interpretation and interests. Social networks have enabled their users to become active readers and have given them the opportunity to become content producers (Hernández et al., 2014).
New users of networked literature thus develop digital literate practices (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). Therefore, poetry or art are not conceived as objects, but as processes (Regueiro, 2012), that is, as a dynamic, changing and living form of communication and interconnection between authors and readers. Such digital literate practices are developed through electronic devices and communication platforms, a phenomenon extensively studied by the field of New Literacies (Gee, 2015).
A practice orientation to new literacies examines new literacies in terms of technology, knowledge, and skills, and practices as socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks aimed at realising socially recognised goals or purposes (Knobel & Lankshear, 2014, p. 98).
As we will see in this paper, digital literary practices, and more specifically networked poetry-related, have transformed the concept of reading, not only because digital text, is a priori no longer based exclusively on the word, on language, but also because it uses other media, other techniques, other codes, such as artistic and visual ones. We can call it multimodal language, where we deal with a change in the relationship between reader and writer, which implies a modification of the reader’s commitment. The print generates a one-way relationship on the part of the reader, while the digital medium leads to a cooperative relationship, where the reader can also be a writer and supervisor of the content read. The reader plays an active role when reading compositing texts, regardless of the technological-literary nature of online literature with its intrinsic characteristics, such as authorship, receptive difficulties and multimodality, typological variety and confusion of genres, as well as the now-and here related writing (Cassany, 2012).
Thus, in the reading and creation of this type of literature, the active role is determined by the transmission channel of the texts, by the relationship established between the author and the reader, by that receptive complexity; in other words, the network that determines the way of reading, of conceiving literature, of approaching it, of establishing a reading community and of appropriating the texts. In addition to allowing access to external knowledge, digital environments are also communicative, socialising tools that go beyond the mere transfer of information and enable readers to identify directly with the text. In short, networked literature and the associated literate practices have created a new reading community, a new form of literature socialisation beyond or parallel to traditional forms of transmission, such as literary gatherings.
Socialisation of digital literature
As previously noted, dissemination has always been the ultimate aim of literature. It is thus not surprising that in the 21st century the dissemination channel of literary texts is no longer exclusively paper, but also digital media (Hayles, 2008), which, in turn, has allowed for a wider dissemination of literary works, thus overcoming the traditional idea that reading is a minority activity (Cerrillo, 2005). Booktrailers, blogs or Youtube channels are a clear example of this kind of transfer from traditional paper to digital literature. These are digital products based on the printed book and therefore they could not be considered as digital literature strictly speaking, but rather digital products with a great deal of cultural and pedagogical possibilities and applications (Aliagas & Margallo, 2016), many of which related to the fan phenomenon (Jenkins, 2009; Establés, 2019).
Network reading and writing. The Wattpad platform
When we refer to online reading and writing, we can refer to multiple digital literacy possibilities. At least, there are 30 million books on the Internet. This bibliographic collection is an ever-growing collection of short stories, novels and poems published on online platforms such as Wattpad. By way of comparison to assess the volume and importance of this type of literature, the Library of the US Congress, one of the largest libraries in the world, has around 39 million books catalogued. The sheer scale of the volume of networked literature is therefore clear (Pianzola et al., 2020). Wattpad is a platform created as an app for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile in Toronto, Canada, in 2007. It currently has 80 million users and generates a business of more than $100 million a year. It also allows free publication of texts of a series of genres, mainly narrative. The app itself allows you to publish literary texts of action, adventure, chicklit, sci-fi, classics, spiritual, fanfic, fantasy, short stories, humour, mystery, suspense, non-fiction, historical novels, young adult literature, paranormal, romance, horror, vampires and werewolves, as well as poetry.
We can see how the vast majority of these sub-genres are related to a young reader profile, who likes narrative discourses, both written and audio-visual, which are fashionable in the first decades of the 21st century and which, in turn, generate prequels or sequels. As we will see, some of Wattpad’s successful stories have been turned into bestsellers, even made into films. In particular, the sub-genres with the largest presence on the platform are those related to high fantasy and gothic fiction. We find classic genres of traditional literature alongside, such as the historical novel and the short story, which have a small group of staunch followers. Finally, there is also a significant presence of literature potentially read by women: chicklit and romantic fiction. In fact, the main audience that receives and generates stories in the community is female.
Wattpad is primarily aimed at young people. Many authors manage to publish their books on this platform, as well as in print or electronically, for commercial sale. As a result of this business, publishing houses mainly dedicated to publishing this kind of books for young people who frequent this type of community have emerged, such as the Barcelona publishing house Nova Casa. In its catalogue, there are both Spanish and Latin American authors, most of them women. Some representative examples of these young authors are the Spanish Cristina Prieto Solano, the Argentinian Ann Rodd, the Bolivian Carla Angelo, the Brazilian Beca Aberdeen, the Chilean Belén Santis, the Costa Rican Claudia Oviedo, the Mexican Ana Coello, the Uruguayan Giselle Schwarzkopf, and the Venezuelan Alex Mírez. Some of them have even made it to the big publishing houses, as is the case of the Chilean Lily del Pilar, who published her novel Mi vida es un desastre (2016), from the Planeta publishing house, after more than 100,000 fans had read this saga on the platform. Even so, most Wattpad authors continue their careers with lesser-known publishers or online. In fact, the community promotes marketing and literary business through agreements with some of the world’s leading publishers, such as Harper Collins, Mac Millan or Hachette, and with some film studios such as NBC or Paramount. From the texts published in the reading community, true mass phenomena have been generated, such as the After sagas by Anna Todd, originally written by fans on Wattpad, or Chasing red by Isabelle Ronin, which have become, thanks to marketing, true bestsellers with millions of copies sold. This is in response to the accusations of plagiarism that often accompany such apps.
The way the platform operates is simple. Each author self-publishes their own texts and potential readers access them and make comments, online conversations that become small literary critiques that help to disseminate the written product. While some of these critiques are just personal opinions, others use a more specific linguistic and literary level, appearing as brief pills of metaliterary reflection.
One of Wattpad’s most significant and outstanding features is the organisation of literary competitions that goes to promote reading and writing. The competitions are open to anyone who has a story published on the platform. The inclusion of different categories and levels of participation in these competitions makes the proposal an active forum for debate and conversation on the literary event, a true digital debate where there is an intersubjective process of reading whereby readers reinforce their instrumental understanding of the text, beyond its literal interpretation, and critically reflect on the reading experience and the vital and social experience they have through egalitarian dialogue, thus opening up new possibilities for social and personal transformations as readers and as human beings (Dias-Chiaruttini, 2015). Therefore, the literary practice produced in the reader and the author through the competitions becomes a form of literary socialisation and a way of acquiring knowledge about literature.
It is clear, then, that, if we want to understand the reading and writing of our time, we must consider the reading culture of younger generations in the 21st century and the phenomenon of digital social reading for two reasons: firstly, because there is a large volume of reading taking place on digital social platforms such as Wattpad on a global scale; secondly, because user comments in the margins can be an extremely valuable resource for empirically studying the responses of these readers (Lang, 2012; Barnett, 2014). On Wattpad, readers share their thoughts and emotional reactions to published texts. These are opinions, fragments that “represent real responses of real readers” (Jackson, 2001).
Method and corpus
Our research focuses on the study of how the Spanish- and Catalan-speaking community uses the Wattpad platform to write, read or talk about poetry. This study is articulated around the analysis of the following three aspects:
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1. The extent of the Wattpad phenomenon, i.e., how many poetic stories are published in Spanish and Catalan;
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2. the most popular topics and their literary and linguistic characteristics;
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3. the quality of reader participation in the form of written comments and interaction with other readers.
The starting point of the study is the Spanish poetry reading community2 (with 4,631 registered users, 102 published works and 10 reading lists with 195,206 views since the creation of the community in November 2018). We also consider another community of readers, that of the publishing house Josep Carner3, with poems in Catalan, which has 15 works, 11 reading lists and 236 registered users with a reading volume amounting to 46,879 since 2019.
To get an idea of the volume of this corpus of poetry in Spanish and Catalan on Wattpad, the total number of titles published in Spanish, according to a 2020 study, amounts to 1,961,109 (Pianzola et al., 2020). In other words, the poetry works analysed represent a tiny part (0.0059%) of the total. We do not have any studies that indicate the volume of poetry use on this digital network, but we can make an analogy between the data in Spanish and in English. If the total number of titles according to the same source above in English is 24,869,949, the Wattpad poetry community4 has 129 titles published, i.e., 0.00051% of the total. In short, and despite the fact that in this literary network poetry is clearly a minority genre in both languages, the proportion in Spanish is higher than in English.
Therefore, from the set of poetic texts under study, we focused on those cases which, according to quality criteria, had won prizes in a literary competition or poetry challenge organised by the aforementioned reading communities.
The most important are the Wattys awards for English-speaking users, sponsored by the Canadian poet, novelist and literary critic Margaret Atwood (1939). In addition to the Wattys, the platform has an official section of competitions in various categories aimed at users from different linguistic communities, which promote reading and the exchange of reading and literary experiences.
Among all the competitions held on the platform, we focused on those held in Spanish or Catalan. Specifically, we focus our analysis on the three existing prizes: the Josep Carner and J.V. Foix of the reading community of the same name because, in addition, they included 4 poetry books in Catalan and the reading list “Winners of poetic challenges”, as it was the only one of this type in the Spanish poetry community. The set analysed thus composes a corpus of 46 titles which, in relation to the 117 works mentioned above, represents 39% of the poetry in Spanish published on Wattpad.
Once the textual corpus and the related reading communities had been configured, we created four categories of analysis of the texts and their comment threads. These categories are: 1) the language and idiom used; 2) the formal characteristics of the poems; 3) the themes used, based on the platform’s own classification: romantic poetry, classical poetry and gothic poetry; 4) the poems’ content, based on the platform’s own classification: romantic poetry, classical poetry and gothic poetry.5 and 4) the metaliterary discourse of the readers. This analysis also has three objectives: to analyse the topics dealt with and check their degree of similarity to poetry on paper; to highlight the creative and linguistic freedom of the users; and to highlight the use of the platform as a tool for literary learning.
Characteristics of poetry on Wattpad
Sharing of poetry and commentary on poems on Wattpad becomes a focus of interest for the study and reception of poetry in digital environments. One of the sources that generate poetic debate are the competitions above. We find the first of the singular characteristics of poetry in digital environments in the names of two of the competitions: linguistic diversity, which also determines the interactions in the rest of the platform. Indeed, Wattpad publishes texts in more than 50 languages, 15 of which have more than 100,000 titles published. In many of the conversations about these titles, there is a mixture of languages, such as Danish, German and English (Pianzola et al., 2020) or, in the field in question, Spanish with Galician, Basque or Catalan.
In this same veil, it is significant that the competitions are named after two Catalan poets, who wrote exclusively in Catalan, and who are considered key figures in 20th century classical Catalan poetry. They are two highly recognised figures, authors of hermetic and symbolic poetry and, above all, two authors who care for and defend the Catalan language. It is difficult to find a collection of poems where languages are systematically mixed in - let us say - traditionally transmitted poetry. Rather, in classical literature, there is an identification between language and national literary heritage, whereas this identification is called into question in digital environments. This is so not only because of the presence of competitions named after Catalan poets and contestants who write in Spanish, but also because the participants themselves, the poets and their readers use a kind of written bilingualism or trilingualism, mixing comments in Catalan and Spanish.
We thus find poems written in Spanish, Catalan and Basque in the same collection of poems. For example, this is the case of Aaron de Balaguer’s collections of poems, such as the ones entitled Haikus a flor de pell or Sonets del tren, which are written in one language or another depending on the subject of the poem or its dedication. This means that followers can read them in all languages indiscriminately and thus become aware of the linguistic and multilingual diversity of today’s societies, while they come into contact with or even learn another language at the same time. In the discussion thread on the publication of the Sonets del tren we can find the comment of a reader: “Hi there, this is the first book I read in Catalan, I will do my best hahaha”. And the author’s response: “Thank you; I am glad you are making an effort. You will see that there are no difficulties in reading Catalan; a Uruguayan woman named Ilar read a sonnet and understood it. It is not as hard as it seems:)”. Another reader says: “Cool, I am not very familiar with Catalan, but I am sure I will understand something”. Another user even comments on the book in English: “One of the best poetries I have ever read! Beautiful this project, so beautiful!”. And yet another digital reader says: “I feel like learning Catalan...”. We thus see how reading on Wattpad promotes and stimulates linguistic diversity as one of the characteristics of online poetry and a tool for tolerance and cultural respect.
Despite the digital environment in which Wattpad poems are created, the features of this type of poetry do not differ from the features of any other type of poetry. Moreover, the hypertextuality and intertextuality that takes place in digital poetry and narrative texts on this same platform does not take place in poetic texts, most of which are not even accompanied by visual support. It is clear that the authors and readers of this type of poetry are looking for a classical discourse, far from any experimentation, entrenched in tradition, both in substance and form. The only thing that changes is the dissemination channel. The book has been replaced by the screen, and yet what these authors are after is the publication of the hard copy of their texts. For this reason, publishing proposals that collect, select and publish poems in the virtual sphere, such as Ediciones Josep Carner, are growing in the same field as the app. It is symptomatic and paradigmatic that there are no poetic texts on this platform playing with images, such as calligrams or visual poetry, or texts of an experimental nature, on the other hand common in digital poetry publications, such as La otra6 or Resonancias7.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the vast majority of poems published on Wattpad follow a traditional and regular formal, metrical and rhythmic structure. There are plenty of classical forms such as the sonnet and the haiku, and there is a clear desire to rhyme on the part of the authors:
"Unfortunately, the bells were ringing / While that city, cruelly bombed. / It was not yet dawn / and the sanctuary of freedom, of deaths was burning"8
As we can see in the following example, another feature of this type of poetry is its baroque nature: syntactic structures are forced by seeking hyperbaton, as a demonstration of technical mastery:
"Dying with my wolfish cry / in my exhausted night, / and the dawn treading / on our rotten heels, / the product of a duel / that was never won."9
The taste for classical forms probably stems from the poetic models of young Wattpad users. Authors such as Neruda, Lorca, Bécquer, Benedetti or Paz constantly appear among the favourite readings of its users. Moreover, these authors see poetry as a formal, complex exercise in the expression of feelings: “I started writing in 2015 mostly for myself, in those years I went through a difficult period in my life, so I consider that in a way it was my raft of escape after a long storm,” says Claudyan poet.
In fact, the subject of the poems published on the platform confirms this vision of poetic writing in a cathartic, emotional, romantic vein. Most poems analysed are texts that revolve around emotions and sentimental conflicts, or present a social denunciation, the romantic hero in the wake of Espronceda’s pirate. In the first case, they are collections of poems that speak of feelings in which the main character is a self that is in the process of learning, experimenting with the meaning of existence: “I feel because I am afraid, / I am flesh and blood, / I am written on notebook pages, / I am a hopeless poet”10, just as the young authors and readers of the platform feel. The reference to the poet’s own condition as a poet is another recurring feature in the poems referred to. Metaliterary consciousness, consciousness of an authorial self that addresses itself to a recipient predisposed to read, is present not only in the poetic compositions, but also in the readers’ comments. In many cases, this type of poem is linked to psychology, to the so-called cathartic function of literature. They are almost self-help poems, such as the Sanando el alma11 collection.
As to social poetry, many collections of poems deal with the surrounding reality and, rather than from a personal “I”, they reflect from a “we”. The poems reveal an existentialist, pessimistic reality: “We wander along a silken thread battling with life, / like the most eternal asthmatic. // Doomed we are to drift, struggling to exist and to be / considered, / like those whose oxygen is taken away at birth.”12. They are rebel poems, typical of the young audience that writes and receives them. Social demands, the yearning for individual and collective freedom and the denunciation of social injustice populate the virtual pages of these vindictive poems.
Although infrequently, some collections of poems take up the usual topics of literature in digital environments, such as gothic literature with texts populated by vampires, supernatural and fantastic beings, or hypertextuality itself. One of the most regular and productive users is DariArte. Her poems are poised between sentimental existentialism and social denunciation, but in this case the use of hypertextual referents makes the difference, in particular from the universe of Tim Burton and a gothic substratum that envelops them: “Gothic footsteps / freakish creatures / on the background / of a ballroom / wait // Violins out of tune / drip / chords of a requiem / of commemoration / of the sons / of darkness”13. Her poems are free-verse, marked by the use of metaphor and image as a resource to refer to a seriephilic world, where music appears as a constant reference. This user is precisely one of the few who uses audiovisual resources (gifs) with her poems.
In addition to poetic creation, the platform allows for the exchange of opinions among its users. They are readers who value texts, share information with authors and develop a metaliterary discourse. It is a process that breaks the distance between author and receiver, changes the fiction covenant and transforms the rules of reception of literary texts (Manresa, 2014). This community of readers thus becomes a literary critic and its comments generate an awareness of literary concepts and learning about literature in the users themselves. For example, users value the stylistic quality of the poems, highlighting the use of metaphors and images: “you have captured a very successful image for them”14. The use of the term “image” and the positive evaluation show a mastery of the literary lexicon and of the criteria for the qualitative evaluation of poetic texts which, to a large extent, are based on and constructed by means of metaphor (García-Montero, 2016).
The users’ mastery of the semantic field of literature is reflected in the use of first-rate literary references: “Excellent example of good surrealism” writes one user, referring to DariArte’s dreamlike poems. The same user argues, more elaborately:
“I will tell you something else: this is the second time I have been compared with and said to have an echo of an important poet; of a Prince of Poets (as Verlaine was, if you do not know it yet). This summer I met a Catalan philologist and I let her read one of my poems; she asked me which my favourite poet was and I told her Josep Carner. She paused for a few minutes and answered me: “I can tell, I can tell. I was surprised because Josep Carner is my idol and he also received the title of Prince of Poets; that makes me proud and encourages me to write”15.
As we can see in the previous example, they are not just comments, adolescent opinions, but rather elaborate reflections, both linguistically and culturally, which denote literary knowledge. Thus, behind a good writer there is a good reader. Even users’ comments hint at its poetic status, as in the following example: “They tell fantastic stories and historical dramas, no dry branch is neater than the one that comes out of your trunk.”16. Note that the comment has a strong poetic element based on the desire to construct images, with that syntactic baroque style and reference to literary genres that also characterise the poetry we read on this platform. The literary culture of these young users obviously includes audio-visual narratives: “I just pictured the scene perfectly. I have been able to see it in detail, and it has given me a Burton vibe, I love it!!!”17.
On Wattpad, users’ comments are freely accessible to any interested reader and have a mixture of chat and forum format, depending on the synchronicity of the responses, although in general, the timeless character of poetry promotes the forum as the main discursive genre. Despite the volatility of online conversation, Wattpad users show great linguistic correctness, as we have seen, both from a morphological and lexical point of view and grammatically, with the use of accents and capital letters. However, as it is an informal and conversational environment, users often make use of signs to express intensity or employ emoticons, typical of the creative uses of online language (Cassany, 2012).
Conclusions
In recent decades, the role of reading and literature in society has changed. Dissemination and idiosyncrasies of literary reading have changed with the emergence of digital literature and literature created in digital environments, such as booktrailers, storytelling or fanfiction (Paladines-Paredes & Margallo, 2020). Social networks, together with the rise of self-publishing, have made the transformation of literary genres in general and poetry in particular possible, but above all they have modified the way the text relates to the author and the reader (Pérez-Esaín, 2013). Therefore, the communication channel has changed. The rules of the game, of the reading covenant, have changed (Escandell, 2011), and yet, much of the literature created for social media is no different in its intrinsic characteristics from what traditional literature has been and is. The transmission channel is what has changed, i.e., the way texts are disseminated with the emergence and creation of literary dissemination platforms such as Wattpad.
Today, the publication of poems on the web is one of the most important and global forms of transmission for poetry. For this reason, it is necessary to establish how such platforms work and the characteristics of poetry in digital environments. Online literary dissemination platforms facilitate the creation and exchange of texts and opinions about such texts, and enable a rapid circulation of information and creativity, although they are sometimes accused of plagiarism due to the profuse use of unlicensed fanfiction. For this reason, these platforms have tried to regulate their situation and promote their young and new authors through public competitions or prestigious publishers.
It is from the analysis of these public competitions in the Spanish language that we have established the characteristics of the poetry written for these platforms. It is mostly poetry written by young women, tending towards the sentimental, introspective reflection of the self and incorporating some of the usual elements of fan fiction, such as the gothic setting. It is a linguistically and stylistically elaborate poetry, with a baroque use of syntactic structures, which tends towards versification, the use of classical stanzas and rhyme, despite the use of free verse, and which avoids any use of images or audio-visuals as a means of communication. The word is valued, both in the poetic creation and in the users’ comments, which become a platform for discussion on literary aspects and a forum for metapoetic reflection.
Wattpad thus becomes an effective tool for literary learning among its users. We can thus state that this literature maintains the topics and the rhythmic and formal features of poetic tradition, a fact that contrasts with the digital environment in which this poetry is conceived and published. As we have seen, it is paradoxical that Wattpad promotes traditional poetic topics that facilitate the use of a classical style of poetry. Users see the platform as a way of expressing their own feelings, complex, baroque, like the poetry they write and share, and they often do so anonymously, somewhat embarrassed and ashamed: “Nobody in my family or close circle knows that I write,” Seby says in the presentation of his text, a comment that is echoed by many other writers.
These readers are new to writing poetry and share a romantic, cathartic vision of the genre. Hence, the classic use of poetry by its users. Literature and poetry, thus become an act of identity, of both individual and collective affirmation (Davies, 2012). An event in the middle of a long road of digital legal practices, of which there is still a long way to go.
