Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing - Couverture rigide

Allison, Sarah

 
9781421425627: Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing
Couverture rigide
ISBN 10 : 1421425629 ISBN 13 : 9781421425627
Editeur : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018

Synopsis

How practices from the digital analysis of texts both simplify and enhance traditional literary criticism.

Honorable Mention, NAVSA Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association

What is to be gained by reading George Eliot's Middlemarch from an Excel spreadsheet, or the novels of Charles Dickens through a few hundred dialogue tags--those he said/she saids that bring his characters to life? Sarah Danielle Allison's Reductive Reading argues that the greatest gift the computational analysis of texts has given to traditional criticism is not computational at all. Rather, one of the most powerful ways to generate subtle reading is to be reductive; that is, to approach literary works with specific questions and a clear roadmap of how to look for the answers.

Allison examines how patterns that form little part of our conscious experience of reading nevertheless structure our experience of books. Exploring Victorian moralizing at the level of the grammatical clause, she also reveals how linguistic patterns comment on the story in the process of narrating it. Delving into The London Quarterly Review, as well as the work of Eliot, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, and other canonical Victorian writers, the book models how to study nebulous and complex stylistic effects.

A manifesto for and a model of how digital analysis can provide daringly simple approaches to complex literary problems, Reductive Reading introduces a counterintuitive computational perspective to debates about the value of fiction and the ethical representation of people in literature.

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À propos de l?auteur

Sarah Danielle Allison is an assistant professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Johns Hopkins University Press
Date d'édition
2018
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
1421425629
ISBN 13 
9781421425627
Reliure
Relié
Nombre de pages
184
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible