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 Andrew Franta Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution. By Maurice S. Lee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019. xii+277 pp. $39.95; £34. ISBN 978–0–691-19292–5. Maurice S. Leeʼs monograph is a striking study of the complicated relationship between literature and the rise of quantification over the course of the long nineteenth century. Ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Charles Dickens and Fanny Fern to Steven Spielberg, Lee explores literatureʼs long and contested encounter with 'informational concepts and practices' (p. 2)—a daunting issue for twenty-first-century humanists that Lee convincingly traces to nineteenth-century America and Britain. The studyʼs focus is the long nineteenth century, but its chapters are arranged conceptually rather than chronologically. Chapter 1 traces the vexed relationship between 'fantasies of close reading and anxieties of textual superabundance' (p. 20) by exploring the idea of 'deserted island reading' (exemplified by the reception history of Daniel Defoeʼs Robinson Crusoe) in Coleridgeʼs Biographia Literaria and Ralph Waldo Emersonʼs journals and essays. The second chapter moves from reading to the concept of 'searching' in New Historicism, Nathaniel Hawthorneʼs The Scarlet Letter, and several novels by Dickens (especially Our Mutual Friend). In Chapter 3, Lee investigates the relationship between quantification and aesthetic pleasure in adventure narratives and the Digital Humanities, while the bookʼs last chapter takes up the question of 'what counts as literary knowledge' (p. 165) by examining the role of testing in a seemingly disparate set of cultural contexts: the development of English literary studies, Our Mutual Friend (again), the British 'scholastic novel', Charlotte Bronteʼs Villette, Anthony Trollopeʼs Three Clerks, the British civil service, and, turning to the American scene, novels by Louisa May Alcott and Fern and the rise of standardized testing in the United States. This list of (some of) the topics addressed in Chapter 4 should indicate how little justice these summaries do to Leeʼs amazing command of not only the narrative literature of the long nineteenth century but also its historical, institutional, philosophical, and theoretical contexts. One of the strengths of Leeʼs study is its contrapuntal pairing of British and American authors. In Chapter 2, the Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter emerges as a kind of New Historicist, orienting himself and his novel in the face of a welter of historical contexts by seizing on a single piece of evidence. Dickens, by contrast, resists the onslaught of information by attending to organizational schemes designed to make sense of it. If the effort fails in the reality Dickens depicts, Lee suggests, it succeeds in his realism. Lee makes a similarly incisive point about Brontëʼs Villette in Chapter 4, pointing out that it is 'precisely because of its failure to register her real attainments [that] Lucyʼs literary test fulfills its office by making her aesthetic power legible to readers of Villette' (p. 194). Other pairings, however, suffer from what feels like a lack of critical precision. Emersonʼs thinking about [End Page 275] books and reading, for example, seems to brush up against rather than directly intersect with the bookʼs focus on information overload. Against Coleridgeʼs acute responses to the reading public, Emersonʼs 'experiences in print culture' appear to be less a response to the information revolution than merely an aspect of 'his broad experience'—as Lee puts it, 'a print culture correlative to more philosophical unfoldings' (p. 53). Overwhelmedʼs scope is impressive, but this capaciousness also poses problems. The bookʼs sheer breadth of coverage means that its scholarly engagement is accumulative rather than critical. The scholars Lee cites generally 'show' or 'demonstrate'. When they occasionally 'argue', their claims are not examined in detail, let alone contested. Lee describes his approach in Chapter 3 as 'metacritical' (p. 112). The same might be said of the book as a whole. In the end, this lack of critical precision is perhaps the product of Leeʼs subject. At the outset, he notes that 'the only thing on which scholars of information agree is that no one...