Too isolated, too insular: American Literature and the World

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.

HATHI 1M: Introducing a Million Page Historical Prose Dataset in English from the Hathi Trust

“…Our aim in constructing this dataset is to give researchers a portable yet extensive representative sample of historical prose in English across a two-hundred year time-span that covers two major modes of writing. With minimal technical requirements, researchers can begin to build on prior work using the Hathi Trust collections (Organisciak, Schmidt, & Downie, 2022;Schmidt, 2018;Underwood, 2019;Wilkens, 2021) and further explore comparative stylistic questions across our enriched features, as well as individual word features that are already publicly available through the Hathi Trust. In this section, we address the advantages and limitations of this dataset for historical study as well as identifying key avenues for future work.…”