Abstract
Are American authors homers? Do they devote too much of their attention to American concerns and settings? Is American literature as a whole different from other national literatures in its degree of self-interest? We attempt to answer these questions, and to address related issues of national literary identity, by examining the distribution of geo-graphic usage in more than 100,000 volumes of American, British, and other English-language fiction published between 1850 and 2009. We offer four principal findings: American literature consistently features greater domestic attention than does British literature; American literature is, nevertheless, significantly concerned with global loca-tions; politics and other international conflicts are meaningful drivers of changing literary attention in American and British fiction alike; and prize-nominated books are the only examined subclass of American fiction that has become significantly more international in the decades after World War II, a fact that may account for readers’ unfounded percep-tion of a similar overall shift in American literature.
Highlights
In late September, 2008, shortly before that year’s Nobel prize in literature was awarded, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he explained the scarcity of American laureates
Hewing more closely to the issue Engdahl raised -- that is, to the global content of American literary texts rather than to their critical reception -- a slew of articles and books published near the turn of the decade examined the historical ebb and flow of American literature’s direct engagement with the wider world, finding recent “global turns” at points ranging from the early Reagan administration (Paul Giles, linking newer fiction to the “inchoate” national boundaries of the Revolutionary era), to the mid-1990s (Paul Jay), to the new millennium (Caren Irr, treating the “geopolitical” novel in particular), to 9/11 (Bruce Robbins)
Note that the congruence of the variously defined British corpora supports the hypothesis that the observed differences in levels of domestic attention between the US and UK are not driven primarily by Hathi library collection practices. To put it more plainly: if we were worried that American libraries collect British books that don’t properly represent British fiction, the fact that the results in the bestseller and prominent corpora are very similar to the Hathi-based corpora should help to set our minds at ease, at least on this specific score
Summary
Other Continents (2006), “American literature has been seen as a world apart, sufficient unto itself, not burdened by the chronology and geography outside the nation, not making any intellectual demands on that score.” The way in which Engdahl’s phrasing mirrored Dimock’s is striking, but the objects of their analysis were different. These facts of geographic attention do not undo the Americanness of Pynchon’s novel They do indicate some of the ways in which that Americanness is framed and inflected: it is western in the small-‘w’ sense, reflecting the cultural rise of California in the postwar years, yet significantly invested in European history and conflict, with almost no use for either the US east coast or for the global south (both of which play larger roles in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow). How well is this readerly sense of the novel’s geography captured by our method? It is unlikely that the method might fail to capture the general geographic sense of a country’s aggregate literary output, even as it is possible to imagine cases in which it may miss or mistake details that are important to individual readings
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