To be(long) or not to be(long): Literature and community

Abstract Over several decades, the modern world's intensified mobility has prompted a broad interest in community studies in the social sciences, which address in new ways the topics of place, belonging, and identity formation. Such topics being salient to literature and literary studies as well, the overall aim of the article is to extract a selection of features of community studies of relevance to literary studies. To that end, this article employs a typology of partly overlapping kinds of communities, each with its own predominant historical setting, which depends on place , circumstance , and media of communication. Together with a focus on the everyday lives of community members, their identity formation, and their capacity for human agency, they are essential for creative writing. One example is Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which reflects the collapse of a traditional place‐bound community contained within the established genre of the novel. With several texts in miscellaneous media and genres triggered by the November 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan concert venue in Paris, the second example addresses the emergence of fragile communities bound to a particular circumstance and the crucial role played by digital media before, during, and after the attack.