Overwhelmed

Abstract

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 this book shows, 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, the book delves into a diverse range of writings, from canonical works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charlotte Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens to lesser-known texts such as popular adventure novels, standardized literature tests, antiquarian journals, and early statistical literary criticism. In doing so, it 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. The book illuminates today's debates about the digital humanities, the crisis in the humanities, and the future of literature.