Distant Reading’s Implications for Literary History, and Some

Thoughts on Modernism

The way we conceive literary history is going to be

radically altered in the coming years by distant reading.

Literary history still, I think, frequently operates more or less

in the manner of the 1991 essay that opens Franco Moretti’s 2013

retrospective collection Distant Reading, in which the younger

Moretti tells the story of all Europe over the past five hundred years via

the interactions between about one hundred major artists and

theorists: so, along the lines of “At the end of the nineteenth

century, the European bourgeoisie sat complacently in separate

national cultures, but then—Boom! Modernism!” However, the

subsequent essays in that volume imply that this approach is

simply nonsense, speciously treating a mere few hundred books as

if they represented all of the hundreds of thousands published

during that time (66-67). So I want to lay out some ways I

believe that distant reading has, or should imminently, change

how we conceive literary history, as well as elaborating some

further implications that, I think, have not yet been fully

acknowledged.

1

On the former point, distant reading has already shown

itself capable of disproving accepted narratives about literary

history. On a relatively modest scale, Matthew Jockers showed

that the standard account in Irish-American studies, in which

Irish novel-writing supposedly declined in the beginning of the

twentieth century in response to xenophobia (38), only reflects

the east coast, as western Irish writing exploded during this

time (40) [Fig. 1]. On a grander scale, Ted Underwood has shown

that the very basis of the English Romantic narrative—in which

the eighteenth century’s heavily artificial poetic language is

suddenly supplanted by the more everyday speech of the Lyrical

Ballads—is simply wrong: prose and verse diction actually diverge

from around 1750 to 1900, with no apparent disruption around 1798

(169) [Fig. 2]. Even attitudes long regarded as acceptable

theoretical preferences have been shown to be empirically

disprovable: for example, Jockers’ network of stylistic affinity

among nineteenth-century novels [Fig. 3] provides significant

evidence against both pure synchronic formalism, as there is a

clear correlation between stylistic and temporal trends, but also

against pure historical determinism, as there are plenty of

2

exceptions in which a book written in one part of the century is

most stylistically similar to books from another (164-165).

That said, I believe even Moretti, Underwood, and Jockers do

not realize the full implications of this approach. It’s not a

coincidence, I think, that each works primarily in the nineteenth

century: literary theory grounded in the Victorian novel, I’ve

long thought, is influenced profoundly by the unusual confluence

in its core body of texts of a) enough aesthetic quality to keep

academics interested, and b) enough historical popularity to

facilitate plausible cultural arguments. For nineteenth-century

distant readers, then, this means one can often locate the

canonical literature within the larger trends of the literary

marketplace. It helps, too, that there were only a few hundred

books being published per year, compared to the annual tens of

thousands today, thus inflating the importance of each volume.

For example, when Underwood describes the emergence of a

“spiritual earnestness” topic in mid-nineteenth-century poetry,

he can isolate it to a few dozen books, and those books just

happen to include the work of the Brownings (post 4/1/12) [Fig.

4]. Distant reading, then, simply looks like a more rigorous

3

method for analyzing the things Victorianists have always

studied.

Other periods of literary study, though, don’t work like

that. Even though Moretti asserts that the market, not the

academy, shapes the canon (68-69), it’s telling that when he

applies distant reading to the turn of the twentieth century, he

analyzes not modernist texts (as he had earlier in his career),

but The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (71-85). Holmes, after all, fits

into that intersection of quality and popularity that is amenable

to academic cultural criticism. As we become more able to apply

distant reading to the larger literary trends of the twentieth

century, then, I suspect that our discoveries will not really

align with academic literary history as currently constructed.

Consider 1922, always viewed as the annus mirabilis of modernism.

Though we do not yet have a good way to systematically study all

the books published that year, the American best-seller list of

1922 [Table 2] suggests that there was little overlap between

what the reading public was actually concerned with at the time

and what we now teach as being representative of that year. I

suspect, then, that the current vogue for touting the cultural

4

influence of modernism—the little magazines, the social networks—

is soon going to seem untimely.

So here is my bold prediction: as part of the larger changes

distant reading will introduce to literary history, the study of

twentieth-century literature is going to bifurcate. On the one

hand, those who are most interested in studying culture will use

distant reading to examine popular book market trends: for

instance, was science-fiction or romance more popular during the

1970s, and what does that tell us about America? On the other,

those who remain committed to, say, canonical modernist texts,

are going to have to overcome the current taboo on explicitly

claiming aesthetics as the grounding of disciplinary legitimacy,

because, given what distant reading will teach us about

modernism’s limited relevance to its period, cultural

justifications are not going to have a leg to stand on. But if

the Victorian novel has long been the basis of literary

historicism, modernism has long been the focal point of its

aesthetics, and modernists will have to reassert that tradition

to maintain their status in the university.

5

Figure 1—Novels published by Irish-Americans (Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis [2012], p. 40)

Figure 2—Differentiation of poetic, fictional, and nonfictional fiction diction, 1700-1900 (Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered [2013], p. 167)

6

Figure 3—3,346 nineteenth-century novels, networked by similarityof word distributions (darker-colored nodes indicate greater proximity to 1900; proximity of nodes indicate greater stylistic similaritity) (Macroanalysis, p. 165)

7

Figure 4—Emergence of “Spiritual Earnestness” topic in British literature (Ted Underwood, The Stone and the Shell, blog post 4/1/2012)Table 1: Best Sellers published between 1841-1843 (>175,000 sold in U.S.A) (Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States, p. 306-307)

1841—Deerslayer, James Fenimoore Cooper1841—Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens1841—The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens1841—Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson1842—American Notes, Charles Dickens1842—Poets and Poetry of America, ed. Rufus W. Griswold1842—Mysteries of Paris, Eugène Sue1842—Poems, Alfred Tennyson1843—The Quaker City, George Lippard1843—Conquest of Mexico, William Hickling Prescott1843—The Wonders of the World, Robert Sears

Table 2: Top 10 Best-Sellers of 1922 (U.S.A.) (Alice Payne and James Henry Burke Hackett, 80 Years of Best-Sellers: 1895-1975, p. 93)

8

1. If Winter Comes, A. S. M. Hutchinson2. The Sheik, Edith Hull3. Gentle Julia, Booth Tarkington4. The Head of the House of Coombe, Francis Hodgson Burnett5. Simon Called Peter, Robert Keable6. The Breaking Point, Mary Roberts Rinehart7. This Freedom, A. S. M. Hutchinson8. Maria Chapdelaine, Louis Hémon9. To the Last Man, Zane Grey10. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis

Helen of the Old House, Harold Bell Wright

Table 3: English-Language Literary Masterpieces Published in 1922(works discussed in Kevin Jackson, Constellation of Genius: 1922, Modernism Year One)

The Enormous Room, e. e. cummingsThe Waste-Land, T. S. EliotThe Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott FitzgeraldTales of the Jazz Age, F. Scott FitzgeraldUlysses, James JoyceKangaroo, D. H. LawrenceBabbitt, Sinclair Lewis“Canto VIII,” Ezra PoundGlimpses of the Moon, Edith WhartonJacob’s Room, Virginia WoolfA Vision, W. B. Yeats

Works Cited

Jackson, Kevin. Constellation of Genius: 1922, Modernism Year One. New York:Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2012. Print.

Jockers, Matthew. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Urbana: U Illinois P, 2012. Print.

Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. New York: Verso, 2013. Print.Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United

States. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Print.

9

Payne, Alice and James Henry Burke Hackett. 80 Years of Best-Sellers: 1895-1975. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977. Print.

Underwood, Ted. “What Kinds of ‘Topics’ Does Topic Modeling Produce?” The Stone and the Shell. 12 Apr 2012. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.

---. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. Print.

10