Reductive reading : a syntax of Victorian moralizing / Sarah Danielle Allison.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allison, Sarah (Sarah Danielle), author.

Contributor:

Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

English literature.

Discourse analysis, Literary--Data processing.

Discourse analysis, Literary.

Criticism--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Criticism.

Great Britain.

History.

Ethics in literature.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

viii, 172 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

Summary:

"An intervention into what Rita Felski has called "the method wars," Sarah Allison's Reductive Reading is among the surprisingly few books that apply new computational digital humanities methods to a specific field. The book is a manifesto for and a model of how digital analysis can provide daringly simple approaches to complex literary problems. Reductive Reading contributes to Victorian studies, as well as to studies in the novel and narrative, by introducing a computational perspective to debates about the value of fiction and the ethical representation of people in literature. Its analyses examine how patterns that form little part of our conscious experience of reading nevertheless structure our experience of books, and how linguistic patterns in moral commentary or the representation of dialogue comment on the story in the process of narrating it. Reductive Reading reveals a counterintuitive truth about criticism: that one of the most powerful ways to generate subtle reading is to be reductive; that is, to design projects with the questions up front, with a clear statement of how we propose to find the answers"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction the syntax of Victorian moralizing: on choosing a proxy for style

In defense of reading reductively

The shockingly subtle criticism of the London Quarterly Review, 1855-1861

Relative clauses and the narrative present tense in George Eliot

generalization and declamation : Elizabeth Barrett Browning's present-tense poetics

A moral technology: speech tags in Charles Dickens's dialogue

Conclusion : a grammar of perception.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

ISBN:

9781421425627

1421425629

OCLC:

1007085554