Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, And The Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution

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An engaging look at how debates over the fate of literature in our digital age are powerfully conditioned by the nineteenth century's information revolution. What happens to literature during an information revolution? How do readers and writers adapt to proliferating data and texts? These questions appear uniquely urgent today in a world of information overload, big data, and the digital humanities. But as Maurice Lee shows in Overwhelmed, these concerns are not new—they also mattered in the nineteenth century, as the rapid expansion of print created new relationships between literature and information. Exploring four key areas—reading, searching, counting, and testing—in which nineteenth-century British and American literary practices engaged developing information technologies, Overwhelmed delves into a diverse range of writings, from canonical works by Coleridge, Emerson, Charlotte Brontë, Hawthorne, and Dickens to lesser-known texts such as popular adventure novels, standardized literature tests, antiquarian journals, and early statistical literary criticism. In doing so, Lee presents a new argument: rather than being at odds, as generations of critics have viewed them, literature and information in the nineteenth century were entangled in surprisingly collaborative ways. An unexpected, historically grounded look at how a previous information age offers new ways to think about the anxieties and opportunities of our own, Overwhelmed illuminates today’s debates about the digital humanities, the crisis in the humanities, and the future of literature.

Author(s): Maurice S. Lee
Edition: 1
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2019

Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 295
Tags: American Literature: 19th Century: History And Cricitism; Literature And Science: United States: History: 19th Century; Literature And Science

Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One | Reading
Chapter Two | Searching
Chapter Three | Counting
Chapter Four | Testing
Notes
Index