Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee Christopher Hanlon (bio) Maurice S. Lee. Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. 277. $39.95 hardcover. A curiosity about his own ways of navigating textual superabundance shapes so many junctures of Maurice Lee’s Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution. For example, about 60 pages in he develops a reading of The Scarlet Letter culling from searches he’s conducted within The American Periodical Series and Accessible Archives, the results of which reveal that from 1830 to 1850, the word “scarlet” had a way of turning up alongside the word “slavery” (247 times, he explains, “some of them potentially meaningful” [65–66]). But then, turning on himself, he reminds us that “the New Historicism and its legacy do not offer much guidance for weighing the significance of competing material” (67), a problem exacerbated by the advent of searchable online archives at just the moment when almost all of us were adopting New Historicist interpretive practices that privilege the outlier anecdote—or the forgotten, quirky historical/textual fragment—over wider historical trends. In such circumstances it can be useful, Lee suggests, to run the numbers. His quick demonstration of the statistical arbitrariness of his own reading of The Scarlet Letter’s adjacency to certain nineteenth-century ways of talking about slavery reveals that those 247 hits represent a 2.2% chance that the words “scarlet” and “slavery” will accompany one another in texts printed between 1830 and 1850; but then, [End Page 360] “scarlet” is about as likely to appear near words like “bank” or “clock,” though no one’s currently falling all over themselves to read The Scarlet Letter as an allegory of banking. Maybe they should. Overwhelmed questions the lingering humanistic disdain for algorithmic taste, standardized taxonomies of literary understanding, and quantitative structures of knowledge. With droll dexterity, Lee offers a literary history of those anxieties, depicting the nineteenth century as a period of misgiving over proliferating text as well as angst over the status of the literary in a culture being reshaped by the superabundance of print culture. “Before Big Data and Big Tech, before DH and the dominance of STEM fields,” Lee explains, “the nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of information that shaped the content and uses of literature” (4). My experience of this book is of simultaneous arrest, unease, and reassurance. I am fascinated by its detailed literary histories of the ways writers and readers responded to textual excess or quantitative taxonomies, but I’m also disquieted to see how many of my own anxieties—about the state of my profession and its mission in an academy increasingly enamored of the quantitative and a society that often seems unable to focus—turn out to replay much older qualms. At the same time and in just that sense, there’s something encouraging about Overwhelmed, which questions antipodal understandings of the literary and the informational by exploring their increasing entwinement during the nineteenth century. Lee’s first chapter approaches the nineteenth-century experience of reading in a culture defined by growing proliferations of print. The experience of textual overabundance prompted a nostalgia for what Lee calls “desert island reading,” the sort of reading whose paradigmatic affective state is that of absorption in a single book. The emblematic nineteenth-century desert island work, appropriately enough, was Robinson Crusoe, about which generations of readers waxed fondly as a childhood reading experience that could provide later conduit back to an age of innocence prior to overabundance. Both the chapter’s other focal points, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo Emerson, meditated over the burgeoning of print, if in contrasting ways. Coleridge voices his own anxiety over the waning of close reading and the threat posed to the literary by the merely informative. But for his part, Emerson engages the textual proliferation of his day by acknowledging his own lack of “system” as a reader even as he gives other readers a pass to skim, surface-read, or simply wander within information superabundance—willfully missing the forest for the trees—making...