Writing, Reception, Intertextuality

Abstract

Reading has come under renewed scrutiny in the digital age, a result of the defamiliarization of the medium that has also brought about a thorough rethinking of what is meant by “text,” “book,” “author,” “publish,” and other terms that map our understanding of how ideas are circulated through technologies of inscription. The meaning and method of reading within digital spaces have vacillated between two extremes of scale: the vastness of aggregation made possible by largescale text digitization (exemplified early on by text corpora such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Middle English Dictionary, and later by Early English Books Online), and the minute scrutiny made possible by the detailed modeling of individual instances, as for instance in digital scholarly editions like the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. Since the early 2000s, fascination with largescale data analysis has shifted attention toward modes of reading that sample the source to produce a derived text — a statistical artifact from which we can in turn read clusters of words, shifts in topic or register, and changes in orthographic habits.1 These remote reading practices, however, fail to capitalize on valuable modeling of the individual text, but more recently researchers have been exploring ways of bringing these two ends of the digital spectrum into closer conversation. This rapprochement is particularly intriguing for the study of textual reception, since it opens up for analysis the points of connection between an individual text and the full network of cultural connections that constitute its circulation, readership, and reception: authors, publishers, readers, reviewers, and collectors. This essay explores the study of readership and reception of women’s writing through the lens of these emerging digital methods, examining two corpora related to women’s writing with largescale analytical methods that are dependent on and informed by the detailed textual models in these collections’ metadata and markup. Our focus is on the late eighteenth century, but the collection whose reception we are study•