Reading by Numbers

Recalibrating the Literary Field

By (author) Katherine Bode

Publication date:

01 July 2012

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780857284549

‘Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field’ is the first book to use digital humanities strategies to integrate the scope and methods of book and publishing history with issues and debates in literary studies. By mining, visualising and modelling data from ‘AustLit’ – an online bibliography of Australian literature that leads the world in its comprehensiveness and scope – this study revises established conceptions of Australian literary history, presenting new ways of writing about literature and publishing and a new direction for digital humanities research. The case studies in this book offer insight into a wide range of features of the literary field, including trends and cycles in the gender of novelists, the formation of fictional genres and literary canons, and the relationship of Australian literature to other national literatures.

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

‘Bode doesn’t pull her punches. What this book shows is that, given sufficiently extensive and longitudinal publication data, existing assumptions and generalisations about the trends of recent and historical literary publishing can be challenged in ways no longer dependent on anecdote and impression. This brings freshness to existing debates concerning historical literary publishing, both directly for Australian literature and implicitly for all others.’ —Professor Paul Eggert, Australian Defence Force Academy