American; Intersections
Digital Scholarship, Economics, and the American Literary Canon
By , University of Nebraska-Lincoln (March 2009)
Sections: American, Intersections
Subjects: Literature, American Literature.
People: Melville, Herman, Dickinson, Emily , Twain, Mark .
Periods: 1000 - 1999, 1700-1799, 1800-1899, 1900-1999.
Key Topics: ethnicity, electronic media, race, homosexuality.
Abstract
This article explores the nature of the newly emerging digital canon of American literature, a canon that is developing partly by design and partly by chance. Whether in mass-digitization projects or in electronic scholarly editing, there is a strong predominance of electronic projects devoted to the study of literatures and cultures from the nineteenth century or earlier (copyright restrictions limit work on later periods). In addition, though some of the material needed for American literary study is publicly accessible, a significant amount of material is available only via subscription. Yet only some libraries can afford electronic access and only some users have university affiliations – thus the availability of information is limited significantly. Problems are especially acute for independent scholars and those at smaller or under-funded institutions who often lack access to fee-based resources. Ventures like Google Book Search admirably make massive numbers of books widely available to readers, but such projects lack the structures useful for advanced work. When scholars attempt to create a digital scholarly edition (sometimes called an ‘archive’ or a ‘digital thematic research collection’), and insist on rigor and a full critical apparatus, we trade Google's equalizing treatment of texts for a highly specialized and inevitably expensive treatment of a limited number of texts.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00622.x
This article abstract has been viewed 1965 times.
Top 5 related articles
-
Hemispheric American Studies: Preliminary Thoughts on Research and Pedagogical Challenges
By , Rice University
(Vol. 5, April 2008)
Literature Compass -
Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century
By , Harvard University
(Vol. 4, March 2007)
Literature Compass -
Exodus as Travelling Theory: Excavating the Promised Land in the African American Imagination
By , Goldsmiths College, University of London
(Vol. 4, March 2007)
Literature Compass -
Becoming an E-Bookworm
By By
(Vol. 1, October 2003)
Literature Compass -
Clasping Hands Across the Gulf: The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century
By and , University of Leeds and Exeter College, University of Oxford
(Vol. 1, November 2003)
Literature Compass
Top 5 Related Blackwell Reference Chapters
The Gay Novel in the United States 1900–1950
Is the novel fundamentally inimical to queer sexuality? Charles Warren Stoddard was the first American ...
By Christopher Looby
“We're Trying Hard as Hell to Free Ourselves”: Southern History and Race in the Making of William Faulkner's Literary Terrain
It was a different time, the late 1950s, in Mississippi, in the South, and in America. In a series of ...
By Grace Elizabeth Hale and Robert Jackson
Race as Fact and Fiction in William Faulkner
At this late date, most of us realize that “race,” understood as a matter of genetic differentiation, ...
By Barbara Ladd
“Why Are You So Black?” Faulkner's Whiteface Minstrels, Primitivism, and Perversion
A book is the writer's secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can't reconcile them.William Faulkner, ...
By John N. Duvall
Racial Uplift and the Politics of African American Fiction
In the postbellum nineteenth century, the federal program known as Reconstruction deployed troops in ...
By Gene Andrew Jarrett