Reading by Numbers
Recalibrating the Literary Field
About This Book
‘Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field’ proposes and demonstrates a new digital approach to literary history, and is the first book to use data mining, visualisation and modelling to integrate the scope and methods of book and publishing history with issues and debates in literary studies. By extracting and analysing information from the most comprehensive online bibliography of a national literature – ‘AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource’ – this study reveals hitherto unrecognised trends that refigure conceptions of Australian literary and cultural history in its transnational context.
The range of issues examined is broad, and includes trends and cycles in the gender of novelists, the formation of fictional genres and literary canons, the publishing of Australian literature, the relationships between different fictional forms, the formation and transformation of the literary canon, and the relationship of Australian literature to other-national literatures. The work’s data-rich approach revises earlier arguments in literary studies – based on anecdote and theory – and generates new ways of writing about literature and publishing. More broadly, in demonstrating the innovative ways in which the growing number of humanities digital archives can be mined to generate new and different types of knowledge, this book presents a new direction and scope for digital humanities research.
Readership:
This book will benefit academics in literary, cultural and print culture studies, book history, digital humanities, feminism and gender studies.
Author Information
Katherine Bode is Head of the Digital Humanities Hub at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; List of Tables and Figures; Introduction: A New History of the Australian Novel; Chapter 1. Literary Studies in the Digital Age; Chapter 2. Beyond the Book: Publishing in the Nineteenth Century; Chapter 3. Nostalgia and the Novel: Looking Back, Looking Forward; Chapter 4. Recovering Gender: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century; Chapter 5. The ‘Rise’ of the Woman Novelist: Popular and Literary Trends; Conclusion: Literary Studies in the Digital Future; Notes; Bibliography; Index
