A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History by Katherine Bode (review)

This book about novels (re)published in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers is a print project focused on a digital one. In 2015, with the help of a colleague, Katherine Bode used the full-text newspaper collection in Australia's TROVE archive to find and catalogue some 9,200 works of long fiction published in metropolitan and provincial Australian newspapers over the nineteenth century. The first half of A World of Fiction introduces and promotes this dataset, which to her credit Bode has made freely available (http://cdhrdatasys.anu.edu.au/tobecontinued/), while the second analyzes its contents using bibliometric analysis, network analysis, and topic modeling. Because newspaper serialization was the primary means of distribution for long fiction in nineteenth-century Australia, Bode's analysis of this material has potential to illuminate not only historical newspaper practice but also the wider development of a national literary culture. She finds that Australian newspaper editors apparently preferred male-identified novelists to female-identified ones, especially in provincial periodicals, and to a degree previous studies have not recognized. While most historians have believed that the British fiction syndicate Tillotson's began to dominate the marketing of novels to Australian newspapers through contracts with major papers in the 1880s, Bode complicates this picture. She finds Tillotson's apparently active in the 1870s, engaged with second-tier markets, and in competition with eleven or more other syndicates, some possibly home-grown, whose existence she infers from reprinting patterns. Aboriginal characters are generally thought to have been excluded from early Australian literature, but Bode finds them regularly mentioned in novels printed in provincial newspapers. The parts of the book that present these findings are persuasive and engaging.

As the book's subtitle indicates, however, Bode considers these specific results less important than the tool used to find them. In fact, the book's primary purpose is to showcase and advocate for the design of her dataset, which she denominates a "scholarly edition of a literary system" analogous to scholarly editions of literary texts (4). Chapters one through three present a case that the scholarly edition of a literary system should become the model for future digital humanities projects in literary history—an enterprise Bode would also like to rename, preferring the term "data-rich literary history" (2). Like a scholarly book, a scholarly edition of a literary system within data-rich literary history (both proposed terms are given often and at full length, never as acronyms) should comprise a curated main text, scholarly annotations where appropriate, and an introduction that thoroughly discusses textual transmission history and disciplinary infrastructure. Like a good modern scholarly edition of a novel, it should also be transparent about its own status and limits, claiming no more for itself than to be an interpretive argument based on versions of texts acknowledged to be unknowable in their full original contexts. Bode carefully elaborates all the advantages of the methodological innovation she proposes: "Rather than showing a literary system, it presents an argument about the existence of literary works in the past based on the editor's interpretation of the multiple transactions by which documentary evidence of the past is transmitted for the present. Its suitability and reliability for literary-historical research is established by a relationship between the historical phenomena and the data model that is explicitly interpretive and contingent rather than supposedly direct or natural" (53). Bode thus proposes a kind of literary-historical digital practice growing directly from the disciplinary traditions and values of literary studies rather than borrowing methods from history, computer science, mathematics, or the natural and social sciences. A digital humanities tool that could pass muster with critical theorists who reject master narratives and positivist truth-claims is an original conception and may find an audience.

If only it stopped there. Unfortunately Bode goes further...