The Life Cycles of Genres

Literary genres are social institutions constituted by particular traditions of production and reception. But the boundaries of those traditions are deeply contested; some scholars lump the Newgate novel and Agatha Christie as "crime fiction," others insist that genres change ceaselessly, or displace each other at regular generational intervals. This essay gathers groups of texts linked by particular sites of reception, but also models the textual similarities between those groups in order to test conflicting theories about the rhythms of change that organize the history of genre. Note: this is a preprint version of an article to appear in Cultural Analytics. There will be a few minor differences from the published version, notably that author-date citation style is replaced by footnotes.Ope

Why Literary Time Is Measured in Minutes

How quickly does time pass in English fiction? Sampling passages from ninety novels, this essay reveals dramatic changes in the mean pace of fiction -- notably a seventy-fold slowing from the early eighteenth century through the early twentieth. The role of time in fiction is compared to its role in literary criticism.Ope

The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction

Preprint to appear in a special issue of Cultural Analytics on "Identity." The article explores the paradox that the representation of gender in fiction became more flexible while the sheer balance of attention between fictional men and women was growing more unequal. We measure the rigidity of gendered roles by asking how easy it is to infer grammatical gender from ostensibly ungendered words used in characterization. In the nineteenth century, roles are so predictable that the inference is easy; it becomes harder as we move toward the present. But the diminishing power of stereotypes does not parallel progress toward equality of representation. On the contrary, by the middle of the twentieth century, women have lost almost half the space they occupied in nineteenth-century fiction. The tension between growing flexibility and growing inequality of representation presents literary historians with a striking paradox; a few potential explanations are considered

NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009

This report describes a collection of 210,305 volumes of fiction that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. Alternately, readers can simply browse the report as a description of English-language fiction in HathiTrust Digital Library. For instance, how does the proportion of fiction written by British authors or by women change across time? We also divide nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction into seven subsets with different emphases (for instance, one where men and women are represented equally, and one composed of only the most prominent and widely-held books). Comparing the pictures produced by these different samples allows us to assess the fragility of recent quantitative arguments about literary history. Preprint version of an article to appear in the Journal of Cultural Analytics

If Romantic Historicism Shaped Modern Fundamentalism, Would that Count as Secularization?

Over the last decade, scholars have been reconsidering the way secularization organizes literary history. This essay suggests that recent advances have depended on a tacit distinction between the institutional and intellectual narratives once fused under the rubric of secularization. It also underlines the value of that distinction through a case study, examining the way dispensational fundamentalism has combined historicism with an anti-secular institutional agenda. Dispensationalism is now best known because of its prominence in the United States, where it spread the doctrine of a pre-tribulational Rapture. But the movement’s origins lie in Britain, and its leaders were distinguished by a radically historical approach to the Bible. Edward Irving, for instance, discussed historical criticism with friends S. T. Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, insisted on a contextual interpretation of Scripture, and saw the Gentile church as a provisional institution. Irving’s fundamentalist historicism is hard to distinguish from the historicism that critics have identified as a secularizing legacy of Romantic literature. But the social consequences of his views diverged markedly from the consequences associated with historicism in, say, the Broad Church -- suggesting that institutional and intellectual aspects of secularization aren’t as thoroughly fused as literary historians sometimes assume.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Mapping the Latent Spaces of Culture

As neural language models begin to change aspects of everyday life, they understandably attract criticism. This position paper was commissioned for a roundtable at Princeton University, dedicated to one of the most influential critiques: "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. My paper agrees that neural language models pose a variety of dangers, starting with and not limited to the list in "Stochastic Parrots." But to understand those dangers, I think we need to look beyond the premise that these models mimic "language understanding" on an individual level. That may have been what linguists and computer scientists intended them to do. But the models' actual potential (for both good and ill) is more interesting, and will be easier to grasp if we approach them as models of culture. Science-fictional scenarios about robots that become autonomous (or remain mere "parrots") are less useful here than humanistic cultural theory

Machine Learning and Human Perspective

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned to explore differences of interpretation than to describe the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to re-examine the assumption that numbers are only useful for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually bad at being objective, and rather good at absorbing human perspectives implicit in the evidence used to train them. To dramatize perspectival uses of machine learning, I train models of genre on groups of books categorized by historical actors who range from Edwardian advertisers to contemporary librarians. Comparing the perspectives implicit in their choices casts new light on received histories of genre. Scientific romance and science fiction—whose shifting names have often suggested a fractured history—turn out to be more stable across two centuries than the genre we call fantasy

Distant Reading and Recent Intellectual History

Literary scholars' conversations about distant reading have spent too much time pitting it against close reading, and not enough time understanding connections to other disciplines. Distant reading is better understood as part of a methodological shift that has permitted humanists and social scientists to build stronger interdisciplinary connections

Machine Learning and Human Perspective

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned to explore differences of interpretation than to describe the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to re-examine the assumption that numbers are only useful for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually bad at being objective, and rather good at absorbing human perspectives implicit in the evidence used to train them. To dramatize perspectival uses of machine learning, I train models of genre on groups of books categorized by historical actors who range from Edwardian advertisers to contemporary librarians. Comparing the perspectives implicit in their choices casts new light on received histories of genre. Scientific romance and science fiction—whose shifting names have often suggested a fractured history—turn out to be more stable across two centuries than the genre we call fantasy