In its early days, the methods and theories of the digital humanities promised to reform our understanding of the canon, or, given a comprehensive archive of literature and the tools for analyzing all of it, even abolish it all together. Although these earlier utopian hopes for digital archives and computational text analysis have proven to be ill founded, the points of contact between the canon and the digital humanities have had a profound effect on both. From studies that test the formal properties of canonical literature to those that seek to explore the depths of newly available archives, the canon has remained an object of significant interest for scholars working in these burgeoning fields. This chapter explores the fraught relationship between the canon and computational analysis, arguing that, in the hands of cultural analytics, the canon has transformed from a prescriptive to a descriptive technology of literary study.

Using a new visualisation technique for word embedding data, this chapter explores the formation of complex, compound concepts in the late eighteenth century, focusing specifically on ‘political revolution’. Word embedding models offer an alternative method of understanding relationships between terms, both as a function of proximity (as in collocation) and of shared contexts (as in synonyms). By measuring the direct distance within the embedding space between two words over time in a series of aligned models, we can witness two parts of a compound idea bind together and observe which terms provide the binding force between them. Using this method, I explore the way that ‘revolution’ travels across the eighteenth century in relation to the ‘political’. Although loosely linked in the wake of the Glorious Revolution at the outset of the century, revolution becomes heavily tied to Newtonian mechanics, before being pulled back into political usage during the French Revolution. The method I introduce here reveals the hidden connections to ‘science’ in both political and revolution that undergirds their eventual merger into the idea of ‘political revolution’ that we have inherited today.

This chapter models the idea of economic growth in the period of the Enlightenment in Britain. Using methods developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab, it demonstrates that the ideas of improvement and progress supported the slow evolution of the notion of economic growth as a necessary good. It tracks the thinking of the philosopher and political economist Adam Smith as he formulated his ideas with respect to size and operation of modern capitalist economies.

Do short stories cohere into a genre, different from other prose fiction, merely by virtue of their length, or, as some critics have argued, are there narrative and thematic differences that go beyond the question of how long they are? In this chapter, we turn to Digital Humanities methods to explore these questions in a corpus of around 10,000 short stories published in twentieth-century women’s magazines. As we analyze the deployment of characters, the narrative patterns, and the linguistic variety of the short stories in our corpus, we reveal the ways that these popular short stories trace a new history of short story writing. The constraints of “mere” length, our analysis shows, allow short fiction to develop a new kind of narrative, one different from that of the novel. Rather than simply a side-effect of the genre, the shortness of the short story is fundamental to understanding its narrative possibilities.

Our current project seeks to develop new ways of understanding the relationship between the novel and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing by focusing on one of the most popular novels of the period, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther; 1774/1787). With the steep rise of printed writing in the eighteenth century, epistolary novels like Goethe's Werther, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Jean Jacques Rousseau's Julie became landmarks of the new vibrancy of the publishing industry. They were some of the most persuasive signs of an emerging commercial literary modernity. As a fictional network of texts, the epistolary novel came to stand for a new culture of literary connectivity.

There has been a good deal of bibliographic research on the nature of such publishing events—enumerative accounts of the host of adaptations that arose from these singularly productive works. At the same time, there are a number of studies that engage at a more intimate interpretive level with particular adaptations or particular categories of adaptations (although in the case of Werther such studies are fewer than one might think).

Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.