DJ culture has long been associated with the collective experience of the dance floor in Electronic Dance Music Cultures (EDMCs), yet it has also spread through various forms of broadcast technology, from radio to television and the internet. In this chapter, we explore some of the ways that DJ culture adapted to the conditions of social isolation that defined the Covid-19 pandemic. We are particularly interested in the adoption of the streaming platform Twitch to facilitate aspects of virtual belonging and online community that emerged to redress the absence of the dance floor. We are also interested in how ‘online DJing’ constructs conditions for virtual engagement by remediating forms of broadcast media. In this chapter we address how DJ culture navigated the transition from in-person events to ‘being-scene’ on the screen, and how affective experiences of the dance floor, the ‘vibe’ and its communitas transformed during this process.

This chapter compares the longevity of imaginary worlds such as Brontë’s Angria and De Quincey’s Gombroon to Thackeray’s obsessive revisiting of a single novelistic setting over multiple works. For instance, the protagonists of Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Phillip are all alumni of a fictional Grey Friars School which connects an expanding network of characters from across his oeuvre. Through his critical writing, I show how Thackeray was concerned about the affective pull of a familiar, imaginary place on the attention of his ever-baggier serial novels; a problem I argue he explores in The Newcomes, a novel about past relationships into which the characters of previous novels repeatedly intrude. Thackeray’s story about these affective entanglements suggests not only a reassessment of his uses of form, but also the conflicting uses of the novel in general, torn between its status as a literary work and as the medium for a fictional reality.