A World of Fiction

Abstract

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 newspapers 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 vi • Acknowledgments was also supported by research travel funding from the Australian National University and by a Bicentennial Fellowship from the Menzies Centre at King's College London. While I was at King's Mark Turner 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 Language Quarterly in 2017, which also outlines ideas I develop in chapter 2. A version of the first part of chapter 4 was published in Book History in 2016, and much of an earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review in 2017. I thank the editors of these journals, particularly 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 creating 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. Contents •••Introduction: Questions and Opportunities for Twenty-First-Century Literary History these digitized newspapers to automatically identify and harvest fiction. On this basis, I discovered over 16,500 works, a massively expanded record of nineteenth-century Australian literary culture and its connections with the international circulation o...

NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009

“…Although serials are not represented in our dataset, we also admire Bode's attention to newspaper fiction, which has added a major new dimension to our understanding of literary circulation in nineteenth-century Australia. 21 We look forward to similar insights about nineteenth-century American newspapers from the Viral Texts project, led by Ryan Cordell and David A. Smith. Focusing on a specific nation and century permitted both of these projects to undertake heroic tasks of bibliographic recovery that would otherwise be unimaginable.…”

“‘The Tragedy of the Punch Drunk': Reading Concussion in Australian Sporting Newspapers, 1843–1954”

“…For examples of distant reading's recent use in historical studies, see:Bode (2018) andUnderwood (2019).Frontiers in Sports and Active Living | www.frontiersin.org…”