The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities

Abstract

This article furthers ongoing work on the merits of the feminist novel’s intrinsic variability by probing its dynamics in four publishing contexts: contemporary anglophone literary criticism, prestigious review publications, marketing materials, and online book reviews by social readers. We explore how these interpretive communities converge and diverge in their assessments of feminist fiction over the past twenty-five years by evaluating articles from the MLA International Bibliography, book reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supp-lement, and other prominent periodicals, blurbs from Amazon, and Goodreads reviews. We trace the feminist novel’s ambivalent fates—or rather, feminist novels’ ambivalent fates—in and across these four domains. To do so, we engage computational methods of topic modeling, most distinctive word analysis, and named entity recognition. We synthesize these quantitative results with qualitative attention to provocative examples from our corpus. In so doing, we consider how literary scholars can develop more robust understandings of what feminism and feminist fiction mean to contemporary readers and what we stand to gain by bringing this diverse interpretive labor into our scholarly conversations.

The CONLIT Dataset of Contemporary Literature

“…The links provided to the Goodreads versions of our books also allow our data to be combined with reader-based response data. An exciting new avenue of literary study aims to better understand the causes and conditions of readers' responses to texts (Mendelman et al, 2021;Pianzola et al, 2020;Walsh et al, 2021) and our data provides the infrastructure to undertake such a research program across a large, diverse set of professionally published contemporary writing.…”