Civic Fictions: Modelling book-reader interactions in the Age of Revolution

Abstract

This article describes a new, database-linking project, Civic Fictions, based at Radboud University (The Netherlands), and funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), that seeks to develop digital tools to address a series of questions that have long been fundamental to literary studies, and to book history and 18th-century studies more specifically. Is it possible to model the effects that books had on real readers in the past? How can we understand such book–reader interactions using both existing and new bibliographic data collections? How might prosopographical, longitudinal studies focusing on readers supplement or enrich quantitative bibliographic sources on books? Can this enrichment offer us insights into the long-term reading habits of book readers, owners or borrowers? And can we then extrapolate the impact of books onto the various social networks in which these readers participated throughout their lives? Building on the European Research Council-funded MEDIATE database, and creating an ecosystem of linked databases, Civic Fictions seeks to empirically test various modern theories about fiction’s supposed ability to foster empathy, work through trauma and build community during the Age of Revolution (c. 1760–1830). In doing so, it addresses a major challenge in book history, the lack of comprehensive reader-reception data like ego-documents, by using large-scale data on the circulation of books among identifiable, individual readers as a reader-reception source. Thus, the project links book ownership (private library catalogues, bookseller’s archives), borrowing practices (library lending-records) and other sources to individual actors and larger (socio-economic, professional, gender, etc.) groupings. Coupling data on ownership to longitudinal studies of book owners’ lives and societal interventions, it thereby aims to reveal macro-patterns allowing historians to infer how works of fiction might historically have moved readers.