This article furthers ongoing work on the merits of the feminist novel’s intrinsic variability by probing its dynamics in four publishing contexts: contemporary anglophone literary criticism, prestigious review publications, marketing materials, and online book reviews by social readers. We explore how these interpretive communities converge and diverge in their assessments of feminist fiction over the past twenty-five years by evaluating articles from the MLA International Bibliography, book reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supp-lement, and other prominent periodicals, blurbs from Amazon, and Goodreads reviews. We trace the feminist novel’s ambivalent fates—or rather, feminist novels’ ambivalent fates—in and across these four domains. To do so, we engage computational methods of topic modeling, most distinctive word analysis, and named entity recognition. We synthesize these quantitative results with qualitative attention to provocative examples from our corpus. In so doing, we consider how literary scholars can develop more robust understandings of what feminism and feminist fiction mean to contemporary readers and what we stand to gain by bringing this diverse interpretive labor into our scholarly conversations.

This is a peer-reviewed article in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.

This article uses quantitative methods of cultural analytics in order to trace points of contact between the discourse of therapy as it emerges in the encounter between patient and clinician and in the language of twentieth-century US novels. Our computational analysis moves away from considering therapy as a diagnostic tool, either for characters or authors, and towards thinking about therapy as a discourse: a set of words (semantics) in a pattern of proportions (parts of speech, grammar). Our computational models identify excerpts of novels that contain therapy discourse and, in so doing, reveal the ways that the discourse of therapy exists in the novel beyond its expected pathways of entry (through setting, plot, and characterization). In close reading these excerpts, we observe the consistent use of a representational aesthetics of psychological interiority, one that endeavors to approximate a realistic experience of living in and through our interactions with one another. We propose that therapy as a discourse is not strictly a clinical endeavor but is more broadly an intersubjective enterprise—a process-oriented linguistic phenomenon that arises in a more heterogeneous canon of novels than those in which critics have traditionally thought to look. Using cultural analytical methods to explore therapy as a discourse helps us . . . to consider therapy and the novel as interdependent terms of analysis and at heretofore impossible scales.

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