Technologies of the Novel
Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems

The first quantitative history of the novel's evolution, written with the tools and perspectives provided by the digital humanities.

Nicholas D. Paige (Author)

9781108835503, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 November 2020

215 pages
25 x 17.5 x 2 cm, 0.6 kg

'… one can only be impressed with this highly original, thorough, and thought-provoking book. Anyone interested either in the history of the novel (whether French or not), or in current methods of Computational Literary Studies, should be reading Technologies of the Novel.' Christof Schöch, H-France

Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this book's foremost aim is to ask precisely how the novel evolved. Instead of simply 'rising', as scholars have been saying for some sixty years, the novel is in fact a system in constant flux, made up of artifacts – formally distinct novel types – that themselves rise, only to inevitably fall. Nicholas D. Paige argues that these artifacts are technologies, each with traceable origins, each needing time for adoption (at the expense of already developed technologies) and also for abandonment. Like technological waves in more physical domains, the rises and falls of novelistic technologies don't happen automatically: writers invent and adopt literary artifacts for many diverse reasons. However, looking not at individual works but at the novel as a patterned system provides a startlingly persuasive new way of understanding the history and evolution of artforms.

Introduction
Part I
1. Truth Postures in the Novel of the Long Eighteenth Century
2. The Rise and Fall of the Aristotelian Novel
Part II
3. Novel v. Romance I: Heliodorian Insetting
4. Novel v. Romance II: The Fortunes of a Subtitle
5. Novel v. Romance III: Measuring romans and Nouvelles
6. Documenticity I: Memoirs (and Other First Persons)
7. Documenticity II: The Two Rises of the Epistolary Novel
8. A 'New' Third-Person Novel
9. The Novel System in England, 1701-1810
Part III
10. The Evolution of Literary Technologies
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Educational: English literature [YQE], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS]