Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee (review)

In Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution, Maurice S. Lee offers a wide-ranging history of nineteenth-century entanglements between literary aesthetics and the treatment of print and writing as so much information. His main interest lies in the challenge of sheer accumulation signaled by his title, as readers and writers responded to an outpouring of printed information that Lee compares to our own explosion of digital texts and data. His book marshals an impressive variety of British and American writing to consider the ways in which encounters between literature and an unremitting informatic surge could transform, challenge, or affirm four great cultural techniques for managing textual information: reading, searching, counting, and testing (that is, academic or extramural examinations). Each chapter of Overwhelmed examines one of those practices and situates the nineteenth century in a long information revolution that is still in progress.

For more than a generation now, internet-age critics such as Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age [1994]) and Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains [2010]) have fretted about the end of deep reading in an age of electronic media. Lee does not mention them, but he shows that the tendentious drawing of oppositions between attentive reading and promiscuous media consumption long predates cable television, Google, or Instagram. The familiar question about which book (or other media item) you would want if you were stranded on a desert island seems to be a twentieth-century invention. But Lee demonstrates that, by the end of the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) was providing a recurrent framework for wistful fantasies of intensive desert-island-style reading, often infused with nostalgia for a mode of interiorized childhood reading that offered passionate immersion in a small set of treasured texts. (Overwhelmed is not interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anxieties about excessive immersion in fiction.) In a larger sense, Lee argues, the distinction between intensive and extensive reading deeply shapes nineteenth-century literary aesthetics. He finds traces of the dialectic not only in the margins of old reader-inscribed copies of Robinson Crusoe but also in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's paradigm of close reading, and in Ralph Waldo Emerson's complex formulations of reading as information management, thus placing two of the century's most influential anglophone literary critics in the context of the growth of print media.

Lee provides a similar consideration of more recent critical practices in a blockbuster chapter on textual searching. After a glance at the problem of disordered documents via Charles Dickens, Lee considers the question of "how searching technologies shape literary practices under information overload" nearer to our own time (59). To wit: how can the ongoing digitization of nineteenth-century print culture help us historicize and evaluate the New Historicist literary criticism of the 1980s and 1990s? With its focus on discourse (patterns of thought as expressed through language), its search for homologies between literature and widely dispersed cultural domains, and its notorious fondness for the telling individual anecdote, New Historicism might offer an ideal test case for thinking about how we practice criticism in the age of Google Books, HathiTrust, ProQuest, and the rest. Since the heyday of New Historicism, researchers have gained greater access to off-copyright anglophone print culture via its altered afterlife in immense digital databases. Responding to a key New Historicist argument in American literary studies, Lee narrates his search through the digitized nineteenth-century archive to seek and assess scattered textual evidence of connections between the titular color in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and slavery. The scheme typifies the methodological adventurousness of Overwhelmed, as well as drawing attention to textual searching itself as an undertheorized and strangely unspoken foundation of contemporary literary scholarship.

Similarly intriguing are Lee's regular lists of literary data points—thumbnail readings that broaden...