Abstract

Abstract:

This review essay explores three recent publications in the digital humanities that are relevant for scholars of modern literature. Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism fruitfully opens new modes of comparison between modern literature and electronic literature, though it depends on an outdated definition of modernism. Jerome McGann’s A New Republic of Letters exhorts all literature scholars to renew the traditions of philology in order to represent the history of literature in the digital realm — a salutary, but inconsistently argued, lesson. Comparative Textual Media, a collection edited by Pressman and N. Katherine Hayles, which provides an exciting array of close readings and cultural histories of textuality, is strongly recommended. Taken together, these three books reveal the emergence of a new methodological modernism in the digital humanities.

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