My paper will explore the relationship between Oprah Winfrey and Toni Morrison, especially her Book Club endorsement of four of Morrison’s novels, more than any other author. I will argue that Oprah’s repeated and sustained endorsements of Morrison in her Book Club subvert the usual “prices of admission” into conversations about high, or serious, literature, creating a vast subgenre of Morrison readers who oppose the characteristics of the perceived Morrison reader as studied, academic and critical. We might further break out these reading audiences into “readers who read Morrison” and “readers who read Winfrey.” That is, Winfrey’s status as a “human brand” translates directly into the material book object of the Book Club editions of Morrison’s novels, creating an artifact that cuts across social stratums, a “high” novel clothed in mass media glitz. 

My final project will explore the ways in which books are recommended, circulated, and popularized on “booktok,” a collection of accounts and hashtags relating to novel reading, largely, though not exclusively run by young adult women. I will ask: What kind of books are likely to be recommended? What forms/language do these recommendations take? What do booktok creators value in novel reading? I will build off Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance to consider how booktok favorites (which I predict also tend to be romance bestsellers, without mainstream literary awards or resulting prestige) figure in a “complex social event of reading,” specifically for young women at the present historical moment. 

After Oscar Wilde’s remarkably public trial and subsequent imprisonment, Decadent authors and publishers faced the difficult task of navigating a literary landscape that marked their art as dangerous. My project will analyze how Leonard Smithers, a publisher and purveyor of rare, exotic, and pornographic books, took advantage of this dangerous decadence to further his own career. I will argue that Smithers was able to become a prominent publisher by capitalizing on the scandal surrounding Wilde’s trial in an effort to demonstrate how scandal shapes and redefines reputations as well as genres in the literary field of late Victorian England.

A 1922 article, “The Book I Most Enjoyed Writing: A Symposium of Well-Known Novelists,” covertly suggests an important quality of literary popularity: successful authors can be personally well-known. However, purposefully unknowable writers can also achieve substantial literary popularity. This project will examine the desire to know authors by studying the response of the literary marketplace to writers like Thomas Pynchon and Harper Lee who insist on their privacy. In examining the literary label of “recluse,” the relationship between biographical access and literary popularity reveals a voyeuristic desire for intimacy that becomes an integral part of a reclusive author’s literary value.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015055410537&view=page&seq=262&skin=2021

It is widely acknowledged that as the 19^th c. went on, the gothic genre became increasingly more psychologized and less supernatural. I would like to trace this trend and visually model it to 1) confirm its veracity in high and low literature 2) see if authorial gender plays a significant role in text’s being psychological or genuinely supernatural and 3) see if the proliferation of related genres (travel narratives, imperial gothic, sensation fiction, mysteries, detective fiction, etc.) correlates with the decline of the supernatural. As I interpret this data, the works of Tuchman and Fortin, Moretti, and Underwood will likely be invaluable.

To my knowledge, no one has compiled and compared the various explanations for William Faulkner’s change in fortunes from his career’s nadir (circa 1942) to Nobel win in 1950. I will analyze the most prominent of these explanations sociologically, placing theories of Faulkner’s resurgence as positions within the literary field themselves. Finally, I will take a stab at a sociological account of the “right” answer to that question—that is, explore if it’s possible to arrive at a convincing narrative of Faulkner’s individual trajectory while also acknowledging that every account of said trajectory is itself a position re: literary value and history.

My project will analyze interviews with a cohort of British “absolute bestseller” women writers in periodicals from 1899-1930 to outline a feminized form of autonomy that differs from the Bourdieuian autonomy practiced by male, highbrow authors. These women writers construct an authorial persona based on disinterestedness, self-concealment via deference, and an understanding of writing as a natural act of pleasure, invoking an older form of feminized autonomy like that of the poetess. Rather than seeking autonomy from commercial success or popularity, these authoresses pose themselves as pure mediators of public emotion while slipping the gendered constraints of a masculine, professionalizing field.

Persephone Books, founded in 1999 by Nicola Beauman, publishes and sells “neglected” twentieth-century women writers, positioning itself as neither too literary nor too commercial. It also has a more ambivalent relationship to feminism than its larger counterpart, Virago Press, which declined to publish some of the authors mentioned in Beauman’s 1983 monograph, A Very Great Profession. Urmila Seshagiri argues that Persephone makes modernism more accessible to a general readership; I suspect that its marketing also aims to re-direct tastes of already educated women (especially). I will examine commercial and archival materials on Persephone’s website, videos, news articles, and Beauman’s book.

In early twentieth-century issues of the Illustrated London News, nestled among advertisements for ladies’ perfumes, cruises to the West Indies, seaside cottage rentals, continental hotels, and luxury cars, one finds ads for an assortment of proprietary purgatives. Marketed as gentle, convenient, even glamorous aperients for young mothers, businessmen, and traveling couples alike, Purgen, Jubol, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, and other brand-name laxatives make constipation—a universal, but embarrassing and unseemly, bodily process—appropriately legible, through the printed page, to a cosmopolitan middle-class reading public. This paper examines ILN’s changing purgative ad landscape in the decades surrounding WWI, when cleansing and fortifying the middle-class body offers Britain a surrogate fantasy for stabilizing an increasingly fractured empire.

In 2017, Reese Witherspoon partnered her with her media company Hello Sunshine to form Reese’s Book Club, an organization dedicated to promoting “a truer, newer narrative for women” (Reese’s Book Club Website). Since its creation, RBC has launched dozens of unknown female authors into literary stardom. And Kristen McLean, an executive for the publishing data provider BookScan, argues that a selection is “the equivalent of winning the lottery” (Grady). This paper attempts to produce a sociological study of RBC by exploring the honorific of “RBC pick” and charting the commercial journey of one or more of its selections.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/9/13/20802579/reese-witherspoon-reeses-book-club-oprah

Scholars often discuss the literary field in terms of the strained relationship between its creative and commercial interests. However, for African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, these interests were deeply intertwined. I contend that agents in the black literary world defined the field by its interdependence rather than by its autonomy. To explore this dynamic, this essay examines the publishing career of Pauline E. Hopkins whose work as an editor, composer, and author made her essential to shaping and maintaining the African American literary field between 1879 and 1916.

While reading Fiction and the Reading Public I kept trying to pin down what exactly Leavis’s concern is with the “middlebrow” and “absolute bestsellers” she investigates. Compared to Woolf’s critique of middlebrow writing in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” which primarily fixates on the form and writing style of a handful of authors, Leavis approaches these categories through an “anthropological study” of twenty-five authors. After grouping her responses into categories, Leavis goes on to make some sweeping generalizations about why someone might read a novel including, “to obtain vicarious satisfaction or compensation for life” or “to obtain assistance in the business of living” (48). While I’m confident this wasn’t Leavis’s intention, I found her reasons for reading quite funny. I can’t imagine any casual reader responding that they were driven to pick up The Sheik by a need to learn the “business of living.” Humor aside, I think it is telling that Leavis uses capitalistic language like “business” and “compensation” when attempting to identify motives for reading since it seems that at least part of Leavis’s discomfort with the phenomenon of the bestseller is that it strengthens what she sees as a vulgarizing connection between art and capitalism.

In her conclusion, Leavis argues that to resist the “herd prejudices” of the masses we must educate the youth to form a “conscious minority” of proper literary taste (271). While it is easy to dismiss Leavis as a classist/elitist purist, I think it is worth reflecting on how similar ideas of value influence what novels we deem worth teaching today. Why do we teach Ulysses and not The Sheik if the latter was such an “absolute bestseller,” for example? As distressing as Leavis’s account is, I think we still make value judgments about a literary work based on how pleasurable or difficult it is to read. What would happen if we assigned Harry Potter and not Lord of the Flies to middle schoolers? In other words, what is the benefit of teaching established “classics” that supposedly challenge students instead of modern bestsellers?

Regarding The Sheik, it’s hard not to fixate on the disturbing scenes and questions that Teresa has already brought to our attention. I anticipate that these topics will drive much of the discussion that we have in class this week, but, in the spirit of trying to turn our attention elsewhere, I’d like to think briefly about Ahmed Ben Hassan’s bookshelf, which Diana encounters the day after she is kidnapped and raped. Kneeling beside the bookshelf, she asks “What did a Francophile-Arab read?,” expecting to find the shelf full of novels because they “would harmonise with the atmosphere that she dimly sensed in her surroundings” (67). Instead she finds that the shelf is filled with sport and travel books (mostly written by Raoul, one of which is personally dedicated to Ahmed) as well as books on veterinary surgery, which we learn later that Ahmed studied in England.  The content of these books as well as the evidence they offer of Ahmed’s linguistic skill (books written in French, annotated in Arabic), disturb her even further because they reveal a much more calculating, intelligent, “civilized” captor than she initially imagined. The bookshelf becomes a recurring image in the novel, and Diana turns to its contents (particularly Raoul’s books) often over the course of her captivity.

We’ve seen the image of the bookshelf recur throughout our readings this semestere: the Harvard Classics five-foot shelf, Virginia Woolf’s personal library of women’s fiction, and Amitav Ghosh’s grandfather’s bookcase. Each of these bookcases offers a distinct vision of literary prestige and makes different assumptions about what belongs in the canon. Thinking about the bookshelf in these terms, I’m interested in what vision of literary prestige, what kind of canon that Ahmed’s bookshelf might offer. What do we make of the gap between Diana’s assumptions and the true contents of the bookcase? And what is the role of the novel here?

In his book on popular 20^th-century British fiction, Joseph McAleer explains that “escapism…[was] the principal motive in reading” (1) for working-class adults from 1914-1950. He adds, “Reading as a means of escape intensified in times of adversity such as the war and the depression” (1). While reading E.M. Hull’s popular romance novel The Sheik (1919), I found myself wondering what would’ve made this book appealing to its main audience: working-class women. McAleer cites a passage from The Times (1917) that maintains, “The tastes of the working-girl reader incline to the adventurous and romantic. She wants something that is not wordy and will hold her attention” (14). While The Sheik is a “romantic” adventure—one that takes place in an “exotic” setting that would be likely to intrigue and attract female readers—it is also a deeply troubling story about female confinement and sexual assault. For in Hull’s novel, Diana doesn’t simply fall in love with a charming Arab Sheik. She falls in love with an Arab Sheik who entraps and rapes her.

I found it interesting to learn that in the 1921 silent film adaptation of The Sheik, Ahmed doesn’t rape Diana. But in an entry on the film for Turner Classics, James Steffen explains that this decision was made in order to “preempt the censors” (Steffen), not to revise the novel’s troubling gender politics. In fact, according to a review of the film from Variety, it was actually the omission of these rapes that made the film less successful: “The same novel, preposterous and ridiculous as it was, won out because it dealt with every caged woman’s desire to be caught up in a love clasp by some he-man who would take the responsibility and dispose of the consequences” (qtd. in Steffen). I wonder what other kinds of “desires” Hull’s novel may have elicited from its audience. Would female readers have found Diana’s androgynous identity thrilling? Would they have identified with her longing to escape from her oppressive life and brother? How, though, do such desires manage to exist in a narrative that romanticizes rape?

https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/500793/the-sheik/#articles-reviews?articleId=387079

Like Vianna, I too am interested in the number of reading practices necessary to interpret the descriptions of the literary field the algorithms produced. I was also surprised by how frequently the authors acknowledged the limitations of their own arguments. Underwood even says that his methodology “has a significant weak spot” (93) and “turning those models into fully satisfying stories could take several more decades” (109). In my experience, it’s rare to find this kind of frankness in literary studies where the task of the essay is to produce a clear argument that appears to have few (if any) weaknesses. There seems to be a liberty in this scientific approach to literature that takes description as its primary task. Specific arguments seem to still be reliant on close readings of text. 

In acknowledging the limitations of digitization, Algee-Hewitt, et al and Underwood checked my unrealistic hopes that distant reading and digitization would provide a more inclusive or expansive vision of the literary field. As Algee-Hewitt, et al noted, “with digital technology the relationship between the three layers has changed; the corpus of a project can now easily be (almost) as large as the archive, while the archive itself is becoming—in modern times—(almost) as large as all of published literature” (2). For me, the notion of an expanding archive could be the remedy to the historical violences and silences (to borrow from Saidiya Hartman) of the archive, but as both critics observe, the archive is still a significant limitation to that kind of work. Despite the grand scale of studies like these, “libraries don’t buy books for representative samples; they want books they consider worth preserving; good books; good, according to the principles that are likely to be similar to those that lead to the formations of canons” (2). As Underwood mentions, finding “some way to measure the effects of imbalances” when “sheer underrepresentation in the data set, by itself, is an eloquent fact” remains a challenge (94,95). 

(Many of us, appropriately, read Gissing’s New Grub Street for our Victorian Fiction seminar this week)

In her blog post, Lucina helpfully outlines the work computers, through machine learning, are able to perform in Ted Underwood’s chapter. Of course, Underwood’s algorithm is also intensely connected with the human—he explains the process of selecting the texts to be analyzed, the time period selected, the periodicals considered, etc. Equally obvious is the human work of interpretation Underwood performs to make his results legible to readers, particularly in connecting his finding of gradual “diversification” of a reading audience as a corrective to Huyssen’s “great divide” between “high art and mass culture” (103-4). However, I was also really struck by the way Underwood’s methodology required not just that he interpret the data once it has been run through the algorithm, but that he “read over [the model]’s shoulder” (82). It seems, as the model works to read trends in literary prestige, one at the same time must read the model’s readings to have any kind of detailed understanding of what is being measured. 

I was also fascinated by the moments in Underwood’s study where he calls on the specialized knowledge of other literary scholars not only in the design of his study (he creates the initial list of periodicals by “quizzing friends who are who are scholars of this period” (this is also how I figure out many things but have never this kind of informal canvassing so explicitly acknowledged in a piece of scholarship)) but also in its implementation. Underwood explains that he presented pages from both reviewed texts and random samples to graduate students and professors who study 19th and 20th century literature, which proved that the model could differentiate where humans could not (79). I was left wondering, how this kind of method of sociological survey of scholars could be used to ask other questions and possibly reevaluate other issues across literary fields.

Ted Underwood’s machine learning algorithm predicts the probability that a given work is part of the set of works reviewed in a group of prestigious publications. In the case of poetry from 1820 – 1899, the prediction is almost 80% accurate. (This requires that probabilities be collapsed into the categories of more likely to be reviewed than not, and vice versa.)

In its training phase, the algorithm does something a human could never do: it identifies groups of words whose presences/absences are most likely to sort the work into the correct category: reviewed or unreviewed (an approximation of prestigious or not-prestigious). Computers are good at counting; humans are not. Even though what the computer does is extremely different from human reading, some differences between the prestigious words and the non-prestigious words are actually recognizable to humans. As Underwood puts it, “All of this boils down to a fairly clear contrast between embodied lyric subjectivity and an older mode of poetic authority that is more didactic, sentimental, and collective” (84). Of course, Underwood chooses the most representative passages for his article. Contrasts in diction might not be clear to modern readers–or past reviewers–across the whole dataset. We also have no idea what went on in the minds of reviewers.

That said, the predictive value of diction might bolster the idea, put forth by Arnold Bennett, that to the reviewer, “The narrative everywhere discloses … the merits and defects of the writer; no author ever lived who could write a page without giving himself away” (97). Diction is apparent even from small samples. So if reviewers were compelled to only sample a work before determining whether it might be reviewed or not, diction might have been a useful feature to register (whether consciously or not). According to Bennett, the title page is also extremely useful to the reviewer, but Underwood strips this kind of material from his texts. I wonder if a model could be trained on the smaller data set of paratexts. Would it be too difficult to encode aesthetic and material features?