Revised Pages A World of Fiction Revised Pages Digital Humanities Series Editors: Julie Thompson Klein, Wayne State University Tara McPherson, University of Southern California Paul Conway, University of Michigan A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History Katherine Bode Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post Sheila A. Brennan Big Digital Humanities: Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital Patrik Svensson Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times Sidonie Smith Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software James J. Brown Jr. Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice Douglas Eyman Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O’Donnell, Editors Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field Julie Thompson Klein Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology Kevin Kee, Editor Writing History in the Digital Age Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, Editors Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, Editors Teaching History in the Digital Age T. Mills Kelly diGitalculturebooks, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press, is dedicated to publishing work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities. Revised Pages A World of Fiction Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History ••• Katherine Bode University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2018 by Katherine Bode Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Note to users: A Creative Commons license is only valid when it is applied by the person or entity that holds rights to the licensed work. Works may contain components (e.g., photographs, illustrations, or quotations) to which the rights holder in the work cannot apply the license. It is ultimately your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc- nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published July 2018 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978- 0- 472- 13085- 6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12392- 6 (e- book) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 90083- 1 (Open Access ebook edition) Digital materials related to this title can be found on www.fulcrum.org at doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8784777 Revised Pages Acknowledgments ••• The ideas in this book benefited enormously from the advice and feedback of generous colleagues, especially Robert Dixon, Paul Egg- ert, Julieanne Lamond, Glenn Roe, Kate Mitchell, Shawna Ross, and Ted Underwood. Leigh Dale deserves special thanks: as has been the case since I was a graduate student, for this book she has been my most dedicated and encouraging reader. I would also like to acknowledge Elizabeth Morrison, who was a generous reader of parts of the book and an inspiration to me while writing it. In the late 1980s, Elizabeth imagined the possibilities of an index of fiction in Australian newspa- pers and proposed it be held in a “computer database.” In building that database and exploring that fiction I have tried to emulate the nuance and scholarly rigor of Elizabeth’s work, as well as its ambitious scope. This book would not have been possible without a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. That funding enabled me to hire bibliographer Carol Hetherington. This was surely the single greatest contributor to the success of the project. I approached Carol asking for advice about whom I might hire as a research assistant; when Carol suggested herself for the job I gained a colleague and friend to share the project with. Junran Lei, development officer in the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University, gave invaluable technical assistance to the project. Work on this book Revised Pages vi • Acknowledgments was also supported by research travel funding from the Australian National University and by a Bicentennial Fellowship from the Men- zies Centre at King’s College London. While I was at King’s Mark Turn- er kindly introduced me to a group of periodical scholars, including Laurel Brake, James Mussell, Matthew Philpotts, and Matthew Rubery. My conversations with these scholars were instrumental in shaping the book’s arguments. Chapter 1 is closely based on an article published in Modern Lan- guage Quarterly in 2017, which also outlines ideas I develop in chapter 2. A version of the first part of chapter 4 was published inBook History in 2016, and much of an earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Victo- rian Periodicals Review in 2017. I thank the editors of these journals, par- ticularly Marshall Brown and Alexis Easley, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for helping me to develop this work. Finally, I want to thank my family. As always, my parents and sisters provided enormous support and encouragement. I also benefited a great deal from conversations with my mathematician brother, Michael Bode, about digital methods, and from his practical assistance with cre- ating the decision trees used in chapter 6. My husband, Ben, and I had two children during the writing of this book—Elsa and Felix—and it is dedicated to them, and to Ben, whose understanding and support, and “actual sharing of the fatigues of the nursery” (#21693/IV), made this book possible. Revised Pages Contents ••• Introduction: Questions and Opportunities for Twenty- First- Century Literary History 1 Part I. The Digital World Chapter 1. Abstraction, Singularity, Textuality: The Equivalence of “Close” and “Distant” Reading 17 Chapter 2. Back to the Future: A New Scholarly Object for (Data- Rich) Literary History 37 Chapter 3. From World to Trove to Data: Tracing a History of Transmission 59 Part II. Fiction in the World Chapter 4. Into the Unknown: Literary Anonymity and the Inscription of Reception 85 Chapter 5. Fictional Systems: Network Analysis and Syndication Networks 123 Chapter 6. “Man people woman life” / “Creek sheep cattle horses”: Influence, Distinction, and Literary Traditions 157 Revised Pages viii • Contents Conclusion: Whither Worlds and Data Futures 199 Notes 211 Bibliography 229 Index 245 Revised Pages Introduction Questions and Opportunities for Twenty- First- Century Literary History ••• This book began with a question and an opportunity. These arose, respectively, from conditions of the nineteenth century and of the twenty- first. In Australia in the nineteenth century, in contrast to the much more diversified literary markets of Britain and America, news- papers were the main local publishers as well as the major sources of fiction: local and imported. Literary historians knew much—though as this book shows, much less than we thought—about the Australian fiction published in this context. But very little was known about the fiction from elsewhere that appeared in these newspapers, even as it was estimated to comprise around 80 percent of all titles (Morrison, “Serial” 315). In asking what fiction was published in nineteenth- century Australian newspapers I wanted to know where it came from, who wrote it, when it was published, and how it got there. By asso- ciation, I sought to understand the transnational conditions in which local authors wrote and were read and by which an Australian literary culture developed. In the twenty- firstcentury, the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Trove database represents the largest mass-digitized collection of histor- ical newspapers internationally.1 This was my opportunity: Trove made it possible, for the first time, to explore nineteenth-centur y Australian newspaper fiction in a systematic and extensive way. I devised a “para- textual method,” outlined in chapter 3, that uses formal features of Revised Pages 2 • a world of fiction these digitized newspapers to automatically identify and harvest fic- tion. On this basis, I discovered over 16,500 works, a massively expand- ed record of nineteenth- century Australian literary culture and its con- nections with the international circulation of fiction in this period. The titles I uncovered came from across the globe— from Britain and America as well as Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and Sweden. I found established international authors in Australian newspapers much earlier than had previously been realized, including multiple titles by Charles Dickens published prior to the mid- 1850s,2 along with fiction by Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, William Makepeace Thackeray, Gustave Toudouze, and Ivan Turgenev. How- ever, it was after this time that fiction in Australian newspapers really expanded. Among the thousands of titles discovered were works by other canonical American, British, and European authors, including Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, Oscar