Literary DNA and Google Books

Can digital tools help us to trace literary inheritance and influence? In my dissertation, I claim that Washington Irving helped to originate a tradition of bachelor sentimentalism in American literature that Donald Grant Mitchell extended in Reveries of a Bachelor, Melville satirized in Pierre and “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids,” and Henry [...]

Woman vs. machine? Analyzing texts…

Since it took me five years before I could steel myself to look at my dissertation again, I had forgotten some of the main points that I made in it. To uncover key terms in Chapter 1, which explores the popular literature of bachelorhood in 19th century America, I decided to use text analysis [...]