Chapter 6 - Periodicals, Popular Fiction, and the Affordances of Digital Collections

Summary

This chapter offers what Franco Moretti has called a “distant reading” of popular fictional narrative in the 1860s. That is, it concerns itself predominantly with charting changes in the larger units of generic form and publishing format, rather than attempting a close analysis of a limited set of canonical texts. The focus tends to fall on serial rather than volume publication, while the early career of Mary Elizabeth Braddon provides the subject of a specific case study. Such a procedure of course depends on the availability of comprehensive data sets, so that the chapter also touches on the recent growth in virtual archives and associated developments in the academic field of digital humanities, including the use of analytical methods owing more to book history than literary criticism.