In this Book
- Big Books in Times of Big Data
- Book
- 2019
- Published by: Leiden University Press
summary
This book explores the aesthetics, medial affordances, and cultural economics of monumental literary works of the digital age and offers a comparative and cross-cultural perspective on a wide range of contemporary writers. Using an international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven investigates multiple strands of bigness that speak to the tenuous position of print literature in the present but also to the robust stature of literary discourse within our age of proliferating digital media. Her study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book—as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, materiality, gender, and power. Van de Ven takes us into a contested terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and reader comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of binge reading and serial consumption.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. i-vi
- Introduction
- pp. 9-24
- Conclusion
- pp. 215-220
- Acknowledgements
- pp. 221-222
- Bibliography
- pp. 231-246
Additional Information
ISBN
9789400603608
Related ISBN(s)
9789087283377
MARC Record
OCLC
1136967795
Pages
252
Launched on MUSE
2021-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No