New Article in the Journal of Cultural Analytics: “Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940” by Elizabeth F. Evans and Matthew Wilkens

/ July 24, 2018
Among the most pressing problems in modernist literary studies are those related to Britain’s engagement with the wider world under empire and to its own rapidly evolving urban spaces in the years before the Second World War. In both cases, the literary-geographic imagination—or unconscious—of the period between 1880 and 1940 can help to shed light on how texts by British and British-aligned writers of the era understood these issues and how they evolved over time. At the highest level, how can we characterize the international and domestic geographies of British writing?
What roles, if any, did cultural identity play in contemporary writers’ spatial imagination? What locations were over- or under-represented in their work and how, if at all, does the answer change when we group writers by national origin or by perceived ethnicity? What shifts in geographic attention marked the transition from the late Victorian period to the interwar era of high modernism? These questions, and others like them, have received much recent attention, both popular and academic. In this essay, we explore what we learn when we ask them at scale with computational assistance.

Read it here!

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