BESS Friends: Mid-Range Reading Race, Ethnicity, and Empire in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign

Abstract

Abstract: This article explains a method of analysis called mid-range reading and applies it to the biographies of Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign ( WNQVR ). Mid-range reading draws conclusions about texts by using both data about those texts and close readings of the texts themselves. The data in particular is itself based on human perusals of WNQVR : narratological annotations applied to the biographies, drawing from a schematic system of keywords called BESS. The article shows how these annotations reveal discourses about race, empire, and ethnicity in WNQVR . It suggests that midrange reading can be used to find structural coherences in a book composed of disparate authors and subjects; in this case, it leads us to quantified patterns that represent Victorian racial politics.