Technologies of the Novel: Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems PDF
Preview Technologies of the Novel: Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems
Technologies of the Novel Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems Nicholas D. Paige Technologies of the Novel 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. nicholas d. paige, Professor of French at the University of California– Berkeley, is the author of Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel (2011), awarded the 2013 ASECS Gottschalk prize, and Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity (2001). Technologies of the Novel was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Technologies of the Novel Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems nicholas d. paige University of California University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108835503 DOI: 10.1017/9781108890861 © Nicholas Paige 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Paige, Nicholas D., 1966- author. Title: Technologies of the novel: quantitative data and the evolution of literary systems / Nicholas D. Paige. Description: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020024228 (print) | LCCN 2020024229 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108835503 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108812849 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108890861 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fiction–History and criticism–Data processing. | French fiction–Research–Data processing. | English fiction–Research–Data processing. Classification: LCC PN3331 .P33 2020 (print) | LCC PN3331 (ebook) | DDC 808.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024228 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024229a ISBN 978-1-108-83550-3 Hardback ISBN 978-1-108-81284-9 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. I dedicate this book to its most indefatigable supporters – Becky Curry, for whom it may have seemed like a lifetime coming; and Wyatt Paige, for whom it really has been. The segmentation of history is still an arbitrary and conventional matter, governed by no verifiable conception of historical entities and their durations. Now and in the past, most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed ideas and upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures. These processes of change are all mysterious uncharted regions where the traveler soon loses direction and stumbles in darkness. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962) vii
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