Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. Ted Underwood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+206.

Abstract

In itself, that claim, or something close to it, has a venerable history in literary criticism, resonating for example with Percy Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction (1921) and F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1950). Yet the thesis of Heuser and Le-Khac, Underwood argues, sounds “more familiar than it is” (13). In the older critical literature, this transition was “traced through … examples: writers like Flaubert and James, Conrad and Woolf, who experiment with point of view. By shifting attention from narrative perspective to a looser index of physical description, Heuser and Le-Khac profoundly change the meaning of their theme…. [T]hey also create a broader, longer story: the transformation they are tracing is already well under way in 1800” (13). That last claim is worth dwelling on because it is certainly feels like something that might inspire a literary critic—perhaps a specialist in Flaubert or James—to respond, even if only to object. But the fact that such questions arise from Underwood’s book shows that it (like Heuser and Le-Khac’s pamphlet) is landing exactly where the computational humanities should be—not on the distant horizon of humanities work but right in the mix.