For this most part this post is about not having posted recently. It'll therefore be largely free of anything approaching in-depth analysis, discussion, quotation, or purposefulness.
Also I want to finish it before Lost comes on.
I've spent the last few weeks bogged down by an examination of Paradise Lost that I now feel fairly certain will end up being thoroughly redundant. A wiser scholar than I might say there's no shame in not having anything new to say about Paradise Lost; few do. A crueler scholar than I might say I was a fool to have stuck my more than postlapsarian nose into Milton's rather fully explicated Eden in the first place. Not that Milton scholarship is a matter of nil dictum quod non dictum prius, as so many seventeenth-century authors insisted was also not true of whatever it was about which they thought they had something more to say. Rather that (in keeping with my larger and no less painfully self-evident arguments) there's so much that has been said that figuring out what hasn't demands more years of dedicated scholarship than I currently possess or can conveniently acquire. This of course is a typical frustration. I'd have been much better off, as we all surely would, by reaching down to the very dregs of the archive for some all-but-lost scrap of sui-generis something-or-other the very discovery of which would garner me the full range of literary prizes and qualify me for high government office. But I didn't do that. I did this instead. May the sin lie heavy on my head.
Ah; I needed that.
My re-reading of Paradise Lost was quite coincidentally paired with a bit of pop-technocultural non-fiction in the form of Randall Stross's interesting (but mostly underwhelming) Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know. The subtitle is what drew me in--my interest in encyclopedias and encyclopedism made it seem a nice way to wet my feet in that sea of technobabble I will have to navigate in the final chapter of this my self-created Sisyphean nightmare. I'm one of those who has managed to use the internet quite happily and effectively without at all understanding it, and as I'm attempting to take the diachronic view of those genres of Enlightenment that specifically involved themselves in the work of information organization it seemed to me a little pre-google-as-verb history of search engines and other forms of web-based mediation would one day serve me well. I didn't start using the internet with any regularity until well after the first-generation consumer ISPs had gone the way of my Apple IIC and AOL's web-within-the-web had been more or less dismissed as the internet's answer to the kiddie-pool. In other words, I didn't really know what was happening until after everything had already changed.
Stross's book helped to fill in the space around my memories of people sneering at AOL's early services and in so doing I noticed some connections to, of all things, Paradise Lost. Some of these are happy accidents of metaphor; others are, I think, more interesting similarities involving genre, technology, and how the fundamental change in both spheres revolves around the problem of information management.
I'm going to set aside Milton's strident Protestantism for the moment and consider the poem from a more secular epistemological perspective. Recent scholarship has amply covered Milton's Baconian leanings and the presence of a divinely authorized version of experimentalism in his Eden. Like many things that to Milton defined the postlapsarian experience -- division of labor, strife between the sexes, the hunger for knowledge -- it would seem that the empiricism and experimentation that were redefining human learning in seventeenth century England also had some purchase in the garden, albeit in a more refined, more perfect, or otherwise crucially different state. That said, the principal means by which Adam learns what he does not know inherently is through the archangelic mediation of Raphael, whom God sends down to provide about four books' worth of expert tutorials on the creation of the universe, the war in heaven, and celestial mechanics. Raphael articulates the proper boundaries of human learning and determines on our first parents' behalf what counts as the knowledge truly worth having and what they should consider irrelevant.
When Eve gets a bit too peckish and ruins it for the rest of us, the pair are turned out of the garden and we lose that wonderfully supernatural means of mediation. In the ghastly postlapsarian world occupied by Milton, which was busily being peered at, picked apart, set ablaze and vivisected by Bacon's followers in the Royal Society, the way back to a complete understanding of God's Creation -- complete knowledge -- was via the diligent collection of epistemic fragments. Whereas Raphael once told us what was essential to forming a perfect understanding the universe, we now had to take the comprehensive approach -- learning as we went and determining for ourselves as best we could the good from the bad, the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant. Progress now depended on mediators of our own making, whether in the form of scientific methods that produced a better class of knowledge, instruments that extended the power of our limited corporeal faculties, or textual compendia that collected the knowledge worth keeping and preserved it for the benefit of posterity.
Now back to AOL. In its earliest days, AOL customers who logged on to the service accessed what technocrats refer to as "the walled garden" model of the internet. AOL employed a staff of people whose job it was to identify the best sources of information online and point users to the relevant sources when search inquiries were made. Ideally, then, all of the information contained within AOL's walled garden would be good--relevant, reliable, what have you. Beyond the wall was chaos--a realm of information good and bad, useful and useless, present but not organized. No sense troubling one's self with that.
The problem, of course, is that human mediation of the kind that made the garden such a safe place is not efficiently scalable. We're no angels; humans can only read so much, and once the amount of information through which AOL's staffers had to crawl in search of good value became too large, they could no longer provide the same quality of service. Users, moreover--in their unending desire for more and better--began to consider the garden more hindrance than haven. It was only a matter of time before the walls came down.
The web, to a greater extent than any other entity in human history, represents the comprehensive--the place where everything can be recorded, transmitted, preserved (preservation is a sticky subject here -- consult your local archivist about the foolhardiness of relying on digital technologies for long-term durability). The amount of knowledge available online far surpasses the ability of any individual to find what's useful. Enter Google and their (in)famous Algorithm, which acts as the digital answer to Milton's Raphael. The algorithm now identifies the essential from within the comprehensive: it mediates the masses of information and returns to users a list of sources theoretically organized by relevance.
Obviously, the algorithm is not as perfect as the angel, though perhaps to most people they're almost equally incomprehensible. I'm not entirely sure how the algorithm works in conjunction with crawlers, loggers, indices, etc., and for the most part Google is happy to keep it that way. I will say that I frequently treat its results with as much innocence as Adam did Raphael--a phenomenon that concerns Google's detractors and competitors in the world of seach engines.
Not everything Google points one to is good -- Wikipedia (another institution that conflates the comprehensive with the complete and has experienced its fair share of credibility concerns) frequently turns up at the top of search results -- and those in the know can work the system to their advantage.
And of course Raphael did not attempt to profit from click-through ads.
I have more to say about all this, but I don't (alas) know enough about it yet to do so.
Lost was excellent tonight, I thought.
Showing posts with label encyclopedism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label encyclopedism. Show all posts
2.25.2009
2.13.2008
Austen hates a know-it-all
In delivering a decidedly off-the-cuff and mercifully perfunctory critique of what I am for the moment referring to as an accidental chapter of my so-called dissertation, one of my directors asked, in so many words, "what about Austen?"
By which she meant, how could I justify my argument that Sterne mocked the encyclopedical (a perilous neologism) projects of the Richardsonian and Fieldian novels with Tristram Shandy because by 1759 the novel was in danger of collapsing under its own weight? Given that--as is certainly the case--we so incontestably have Richardson and Fielding to thank for what did in fact become the novel as we now know it? And further, given that Austen just as incontestably carried forth a great many features of their novels? In short, she asked (thought not with hostility--she seemed rather pleased with the chapter), "are you quite sure you've not done something incredibly stupid? I ask because it's a question you're likely to get in a job talk."
And for the first time while under the lights of this particular examiner, I had a response.
Sterne, I said, declared the end of the encyclopedic novel (the nineteenth centuryists among you are lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks--I should say that "long" does not equal encyclopedic, that Moby Dick did not enjoy tremendous success in its time, and that rather than wipe the form from the face of the earth Sterne merely assisted in highlighting its inadequacies) by writing one that wonderfully fails to achieve what it sets out to accomplish. Certain features of the Richardsonian and Fieldian novels were perfectly valuable and durable--psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, intricate plots, what have you. But systematicity and epistemological comprehensiveness were untenable; complete knowledge was not to be had in any book, be it encyclopedia or novel. Things have to be left out.
Obviously Richardson and Fielding left out a great deal. Their texts weren't comprehensive--but they aspired to a kind of completeness that created a false epistemological totality that I think Sterne thought made them terribly dated and rendered them obsolete rather than immortal. Immortality, Tristram Shandy suggests, is in questions rather than answers; the possibility of further discovery rather than a complete record of the supposedly immutable. Sterne elevates the incomplete and the fragmentary in place of the complete and comprehensive because no work could ever be both comprehensive and complete.
What on earth has this to do with Jane Austen?
From a letter dated Tuesday 9 February, 1813:
One might call this a stretch, but when one considers (as I asked my interrogator to do) the sheer tonnage of scholarship done on the significance of what Austen leaves out of her novels, taking this part of her letter for a statement of resistance against epistemological comprehensiveness might make a bit more sense. Austen's novels are very particularly about what they're about, and they're very consciously and, I think, comfortably not about everything. That time in the novel's history had passed; one could have one's sensibility without having to make sense of the Siege of Namur, a trip to Europe, a cyclopedia, or a treatise on the importance of names and noses.
Why my prof. didn't seem to think I should make this part of the chapter, I don't know; maybe it's part of the book that comes later. At least for now I have an answer to what she thought would definitely be a question.
By which she meant, how could I justify my argument that Sterne mocked the encyclopedical (a perilous neologism) projects of the Richardsonian and Fieldian novels with Tristram Shandy because by 1759 the novel was in danger of collapsing under its own weight? Given that--as is certainly the case--we so incontestably have Richardson and Fielding to thank for what did in fact become the novel as we now know it? And further, given that Austen just as incontestably carried forth a great many features of their novels? In short, she asked (thought not with hostility--she seemed rather pleased with the chapter), "are you quite sure you've not done something incredibly stupid? I ask because it's a question you're likely to get in a job talk."
And for the first time while under the lights of this particular examiner, I had a response.
Sterne, I said, declared the end of the encyclopedic novel (the nineteenth centuryists among you are lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks--I should say that "long" does not equal encyclopedic, that Moby Dick did not enjoy tremendous success in its time, and that rather than wipe the form from the face of the earth Sterne merely assisted in highlighting its inadequacies) by writing one that wonderfully fails to achieve what it sets out to accomplish. Certain features of the Richardsonian and Fieldian novels were perfectly valuable and durable--psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, intricate plots, what have you. But systematicity and epistemological comprehensiveness were untenable; complete knowledge was not to be had in any book, be it encyclopedia or novel. Things have to be left out.
Obviously Richardson and Fielding left out a great deal. Their texts weren't comprehensive--but they aspired to a kind of completeness that created a false epistemological totality that I think Sterne thought made them terribly dated and rendered them obsolete rather than immortal. Immortality, Tristram Shandy suggests, is in questions rather than answers; the possibility of further discovery rather than a complete record of the supposedly immutable. Sterne elevates the incomplete and the fragmentary in place of the complete and comprehensive because no work could ever be both comprehensive and complete.
What on earth has this to do with Jane Austen?
From a letter dated Tuesday 9 February, 1813:
Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick Quarto Volumes, which one always sees in the Breakfast parlour there, must be acquainted with everything in the World.--I detest a Quarto. --Capt. Paisely's Book is too good for their Society. They will not understand a Man who condenses his Thoughts into an Octavo.Austen is not commenting here on novels, of course--but she is remarking upon a taste for comprehensive knowledge. She had been applied to for information on the oath of Bell Book and Candle, and had none to give (the oath turns out to be part of an archaic excommunication ceremony of the Catholic church--this makes me think of the excommunication that takes place in Tristram Shandy, but of course there's nothing more there than coincidence). There's no need to be acquainted with everything in the world, Austen suggests, and I see no reason why that philosophy shouldn't have been carried over into the composition of her own works.
One might call this a stretch, but when one considers (as I asked my interrogator to do) the sheer tonnage of scholarship done on the significance of what Austen leaves out of her novels, taking this part of her letter for a statement of resistance against epistemological comprehensiveness might make a bit more sense. Austen's novels are very particularly about what they're about, and they're very consciously and, I think, comfortably not about everything. That time in the novel's history had passed; one could have one's sensibility without having to make sense of the Siege of Namur, a trip to Europe, a cyclopedia, or a treatise on the importance of names and noses.
Why my prof. didn't seem to think I should make this part of the chapter, I don't know; maybe it's part of the book that comes later. At least for now I have an answer to what she thought would definitely be a question.
10.03.2007
Dissertation Envy
In the course of preparing for the jungle war that will be the dissertation process, I have come across a fair few examples of the sorts of projects others have done and are doing. They are all more appealing, well-organized, and better thought out than my own. Or so it would seem from the outside.
The structure I have seen for a dissertation and a good number of shorter critical works is thus: introduction, three to five chapters, conclusion, bibliography. Almost without exception, the chapters are 40-70 pages, and each deals with a single author or text. I recently read a dissertation on the "inheritance novel," which makes an argument for establishing that genre using Clarissa, Evelina, and Pride and Prejudice. Another I encountered follows tropes of failed lineal descent through Tale of a Tub, The Dunciad, and Tristram Shandy (these three texts are perhaps too frequently put together, but that's another matter). The pattern repeats in book-length works. Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Stories has six chapters dedicated to Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Delarivier Manley, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth. This, apparently, is how you write a book.
I am having difficulty duplicating this structure in my own work--narrowing down the focus, as it were. For the moment at least I've settled on a breakdown by genre: encyclopedias/dictionaries, poetry, periodicals, novels. I've got a neat little structure there that makes a great deal of sense to me in the abstract. The project is about generic organization of literature with respect to time, or how each genre negotiates its past, present, and future. Encyclopedias, as I will establish in the first chapter, began the century by collecting past knowledge and aspiring to completeness. It ended the century by morphing into a more progressive genre, unable to systematize fully the knowledge of all things and settling into a long life as a research tool. Rather than containing all knowledge, it became about producing more knowledge within disciplines. It's the Britannica I'm speaking of towards the end, and the first edition came out in 1768. The novel, I mean to suggest, underwent largely the same trajectory, so I shall close with Tristram Shandy, a full-on encyclopedic novel more deeply involved in novelistic tradition than is usually appreciated. The last volume of Shandy appeared in 1767, which closes the dissertation into a nice circle in terms of texts and time.
Haven't sorted out the middle, yet.
Encyclopedias are easy. There are a lot of them, but it's easy to talk about the Big Three: Chambers, Diderot, Britannica. Half of this chapter already exists in a term paper waiting to be reworked. Also, they're "closed" units with far fewer and better-defined generic conventions governing their operation. Despite the mind-boggling nature of their stated purpose--collecting and arranging all knowledge--they're quite simple things to think about. Novels, on the other hand, are ridiculously complex beasts, each the spawn of a bastard genre uncertain of its parentage and searching for literary legitimacy. Tristram Shandy is not just encyclopedic the way a novel is encyclopedic, by which I mean capable of containing and mediating and/or remediating all forms of writing. Other novels (Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Clarissa, The Female Quixote, Evelina, Miss Betsy Thoughtless, A Simple Story) traffic in encyclopedic terms, or at least the discourse of completeness, order, epistemological utility. This is intergeneric encyclopedism--a novel, in its post-taxonomic-free-for-all definition, gives you poems, songs, ballads, plays, letters, essays, treatises, sermons, romances, newspapers, magazines, epics, fables, true histories, amatory fiction, didacticism, and so on. They're recognizably present, though fundamentally altered in their synthesis by the novel's fictive status and formal realism. Chivalry isn't dead, it's just been burdened with jointures. Shandy of course takes this to extremes. It has the intergeneric encyclopedism of the novel even as it mocks the claims to characterological and epistemological completeness made so loudly by and by others on behalf of Clarissa, which despite its popularity and number of imitators actually threatened to kill the genre where it stood--a fact reflected, I think, though perhaps not intentionally, by the death of its heroine and the high probability of suicidal tendencies in any of its readers who thought story might count for as much as sentiment. Shandy also, however, has intrageneric encyclopedism. It brings together the entire history of the novel's "rise" by containing and (comically, satirically) abridging the principle concerns of half a century's imaginative prose.
If one wanted to know the history of the novel, one could practically do away with every novel but Tristram Shandy. This is course precisely what Chambers wanted with his Cyclopaedia--to render a great many other books unnecessary. The problem in novelism is that unless you've read a great amount of what Tristram contains and digests, however messily, you wouldn't know it was doing it. To a reader in Sterne's time, though--to an avid devourer of prose fiction--perhaps it was clearer. I certainly like to think it was, because the text is made much richer the more specific its references. The problem I keep running up against in approaching this chapter is how to talk about the nature of Tristram's problematic encyclopedism without becoming problematically encyclopedic myself. To write about Tristram Shandy is to write about a lot of eighteenth-century novels. I'm just not sure for how many or how much of them I have to account.
How do I write about a whole genre in fifty or sixty pages, even if I approach it through one book, when other, better, and smarter dissertators dedicate whole dissertations to single genres, and even then select only three or four works to support their examinations of a single theme?
The structure I have seen for a dissertation and a good number of shorter critical works is thus: introduction, three to five chapters, conclusion, bibliography. Almost without exception, the chapters are 40-70 pages, and each deals with a single author or text. I recently read a dissertation on the "inheritance novel," which makes an argument for establishing that genre using Clarissa, Evelina, and Pride and Prejudice. Another I encountered follows tropes of failed lineal descent through Tale of a Tub, The Dunciad, and Tristram Shandy (these three texts are perhaps too frequently put together, but that's another matter). The pattern repeats in book-length works. Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Stories has six chapters dedicated to Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Delarivier Manley, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth. This, apparently, is how you write a book.
I am having difficulty duplicating this structure in my own work--narrowing down the focus, as it were. For the moment at least I've settled on a breakdown by genre: encyclopedias/dictionaries, poetry, periodicals, novels. I've got a neat little structure there that makes a great deal of sense to me in the abstract. The project is about generic organization of literature with respect to time, or how each genre negotiates its past, present, and future. Encyclopedias, as I will establish in the first chapter, began the century by collecting past knowledge and aspiring to completeness. It ended the century by morphing into a more progressive genre, unable to systematize fully the knowledge of all things and settling into a long life as a research tool. Rather than containing all knowledge, it became about producing more knowledge within disciplines. It's the Britannica I'm speaking of towards the end, and the first edition came out in 1768. The novel, I mean to suggest, underwent largely the same trajectory, so I shall close with Tristram Shandy, a full-on encyclopedic novel more deeply involved in novelistic tradition than is usually appreciated. The last volume of Shandy appeared in 1767, which closes the dissertation into a nice circle in terms of texts and time.
Haven't sorted out the middle, yet.
Encyclopedias are easy. There are a lot of them, but it's easy to talk about the Big Three: Chambers, Diderot, Britannica. Half of this chapter already exists in a term paper waiting to be reworked. Also, they're "closed" units with far fewer and better-defined generic conventions governing their operation. Despite the mind-boggling nature of their stated purpose--collecting and arranging all knowledge--they're quite simple things to think about. Novels, on the other hand, are ridiculously complex beasts, each the spawn of a bastard genre uncertain of its parentage and searching for literary legitimacy. Tristram Shandy is not just encyclopedic the way a novel is encyclopedic, by which I mean capable of containing and mediating and/or remediating all forms of writing. Other novels (Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Clarissa, The Female Quixote, Evelina, Miss Betsy Thoughtless, A Simple Story) traffic in encyclopedic terms, or at least the discourse of completeness, order, epistemological utility. This is intergeneric encyclopedism--a novel, in its post-taxonomic-free-for-all definition, gives you poems, songs, ballads, plays, letters, essays, treatises, sermons, romances, newspapers, magazines, epics, fables, true histories, amatory fiction, didacticism, and so on. They're recognizably present, though fundamentally altered in their synthesis by the novel's fictive status and formal realism. Chivalry isn't dead, it's just been burdened with jointures. Shandy of course takes this to extremes. It has the intergeneric encyclopedism of the novel even as it mocks the claims to characterological and epistemological completeness made so loudly by and by others on behalf of Clarissa, which despite its popularity and number of imitators actually threatened to kill the genre where it stood--a fact reflected, I think, though perhaps not intentionally, by the death of its heroine and the high probability of suicidal tendencies in any of its readers who thought story might count for as much as sentiment. Shandy also, however, has intrageneric encyclopedism. It brings together the entire history of the novel's "rise" by containing and (comically, satirically) abridging the principle concerns of half a century's imaginative prose.
If one wanted to know the history of the novel, one could practically do away with every novel but Tristram Shandy. This is course precisely what Chambers wanted with his Cyclopaedia--to render a great many other books unnecessary. The problem in novelism is that unless you've read a great amount of what Tristram contains and digests, however messily, you wouldn't know it was doing it. To a reader in Sterne's time, though--to an avid devourer of prose fiction--perhaps it was clearer. I certainly like to think it was, because the text is made much richer the more specific its references. The problem I keep running up against in approaching this chapter is how to talk about the nature of Tristram's problematic encyclopedism without becoming problematically encyclopedic myself. To write about Tristram Shandy is to write about a lot of eighteenth-century novels. I'm just not sure for how many or how much of them I have to account.
How do I write about a whole genre in fifty or sixty pages, even if I approach it through one book, when other, better, and smarter dissertators dedicate whole dissertations to single genres, and even then select only three or four works to support their examinations of a single theme?
9.15.2007
ESTC, you complete me.
What on earth, I wonder, took me so long to rediscover the English Short Title Catalogue? Where was my head? It's on-line, free for all to access, and allows the kind of data collection that simply could not be done in an old-timey off-line way. With it one of course runs the risk of becoming a bad statistician, and any conclusions drawn based on findings therein must be heavily qualified; that being said, some of the searches I've conducted have been highly suggestive if not conclusive. Here's a smattering of what I've done in the space of only a few hours:
Search terms: "complete" and "compleat". Exact phrase in title. Any language.
England
Years: # items
1601-1700: 938
1701-1710: 269
1711-1720: 313
1721-1730: 345
1731-1740: 407
1741-1750: 414
1751-1760: 424
1761-1770: 559
1771-1780: 683
1781-1790: 835
1791-1800: 872
England
Years:
1720: 23
1721: 23
1722: 31
1723: 20
1724: 37
1725: 48
1726: 39
1727: 32
1728: 35
1729: 35
1730: 59
1731: 25
1732: 48
1733: 33
1734: 36
1735: 40
1736: 43
1737: 37
1738: 50
1739: 48
Search term: "Dictionary." Exact phrase in title. Any language.
England:
1701-1710: 84
1711-1720: 49
1721-1730: 73
1731-1740: 96
1741-1750: 103
1751-1760: 128
1761-1770: 147
1771-1780: 203
1781-1790: 182
1791-1800: 299
Search Term: "System." Exact word in title. Any language.
England:
1601-1700: 36
1701-1710: 35
1711-1720: 63
1721-1730: 71
1731-1740: 89
1741-1750: 99
1751-1760: 128
1761-1770: 153
1771-1780: 232
1781-1790: 286
1791-1800: 445
(bold indicates largest year-over-year/decade-over-decade number--not %--increase, italics largest decrease)
These numbers will not be exact; though the word may occur in the title, unless one looks through each of them (and we all know what eighteenth-century titles are like--each is in itself near the length of a bible) one won't know precisely how the word is being used. For example, "complete" (or "compleat," which started off the century as the favored spelling but gradually lost ground--it's not until 1761-1770 that there are more "completes" than "compleats") generally refers to one or more of the following:
What qualifies an index as complete, by the way, is totally beyond me.
So it would seem that "complete" in the 18th century is somewhat akin to our "All Natural!" Everyone wants it, but it might not mean anything. The numbers of titles including the term in what amounts to a marketing ploy, however, always go up, decade after decade, indicating that (as you'd expect) "completeness," however it was understood, remained a desirable characteristic throughout the century. It is also interesting that the largest jumps in such titles occur from 1760-1790; why then? What was going on in other genres? The epistolary novel, for example, saw a dramatic decline in new titles from 1771-1780, the same decade that saw one of the largest increases in dictionaries, systems, and those miscellaneous genres in which "completeness" could reasonably be advertised ("complete" frequently modified "dictionary" and "system" as well, though one perhaps incorrectly feels that "system" implies completeness--isn't an incomplete system a system that isn't a system?). Perhaps these are related; perhaps not.
What can we conclude, if anything, about the year-over-year changes from 1729-1733? All was holding steady until '29 (a year after Chambers' Cyclopaedia), then in 1730 we have something of a glut. Did booksellers respond by turning down titles over the next year? Did they then think they'd gone too far and respond by jacking up the number again?
I don't wish to fall into the Franco Moretti track of dubious quantification built largely on even more dubious generic classifications (a la Graphs, Maps, and Trees). Taxonomy in the arts, and particularly in the realm of eighteenth-century literature, always seems to end in tears; a picaresque isn't necessarily only a picaresque, and a novel in the later sense of the term could easily incorporate, interpolate, or sublimate what was once understood to be romance or indeed anything else (those of you familiar with my hobbyhorse will know that in my estimation the designation "novel" for much the period is dependent on this ability).
So if one is to use this sort of data, it has to be done carefully. The strange thing seems to me to be how compelling I find it--how willing I am to be convinced by a mere display of numbers. Mary Poovey tells me--or rather, A History of the Modern Fact tells me--that I owe this allegiance to numerical facticity largely to the same period that saw the emergence of the novel (I have ideas about that but they're for another time). There's something very sneaky about literary statistics. 445 items with "system" in the title, with probably just under 400 of them reflecting what I understand a system in the period to be. I run up here against the same old problem--with 445 to look through, in a single decade, and the inability to manage effectively the perhaps over 1000 distinct titles published throughout the century, how can I ever really be sure of what I'm seeing?
Soon--a bit more of the same on the romance and the novel...
Search terms: "complete" and "compleat". Exact phrase in title. Any language.
England
Years: # items
1601-1700: 938
1701-1710: 269
1711-1720: 313
1721-1730: 345
1731-1740: 407
1741-1750: 414
1751-1760: 424
1761-1770: 559
1771-1780: 683
1781-1790: 835
1791-1800: 872
England
Years:
1720: 23
1721: 23
1722: 31
1723: 20
1724: 37
1725: 48
1726: 39
1727: 32
1728: 35
1729: 35
1730: 59
1731: 25
1732: 48
1733: 33
1734: 36
1735: 40
1736: 43
1737: 37
1738: 50
1739: 48
Search term: "Dictionary." Exact phrase in title. Any language.
England:
1701-1710: 84
1711-1720: 49
1721-1730: 73
1731-1740: 96
1741-1750: 103
1751-1760: 128
1761-1770: 147
1771-1780: 203
1781-1790: 182
1791-1800: 299
Search Term: "System." Exact word in title. Any language.
England:
1601-1700: 36
1701-1710: 35
1711-1720: 63
1721-1730: 71
1731-1740: 89
1741-1750: 99
1751-1760: 128
1761-1770: 153
1771-1780: 232
1781-1790: 286
1791-1800: 445
(bold indicates largest year-over-year/decade-over-decade number--not %--increase, italics largest decrease)
These numbers will not be exact; though the word may occur in the title, unless one looks through each of them (and we all know what eighteenth-century titles are like--each is in itself near the length of a bible) one won't know precisely how the word is being used. For example, "complete" (or "compleat," which started off the century as the favored spelling but gradually lost ground--it's not until 1761-1770 that there are more "completes" than "compleats") generally refers to one or more of the following:
- A "complete" collection of an author's works or a bound volume of periodicals
- Complete as in everything-you-need-to-know; the "complete gardener," "farrier," "gamester," etc. Also in "complete system."
- Complete histories, whether of individuals, nations, events, or subjects, and often including letters, memoirs, declarations, public decrees, acts of government, etc. As in "A Compleat History of Magick," "A Compleat History of the late War in the Netherlands," etc.
- A work including some other complete tool, as in charts, indexes, etc.
- Complete as in perfect, or utmost, as in "complete happiness."
What qualifies an index as complete, by the way, is totally beyond me.
So it would seem that "complete" in the 18th century is somewhat akin to our "All Natural!" Everyone wants it, but it might not mean anything. The numbers of titles including the term in what amounts to a marketing ploy, however, always go up, decade after decade, indicating that (as you'd expect) "completeness," however it was understood, remained a desirable characteristic throughout the century. It is also interesting that the largest jumps in such titles occur from 1760-1790; why then? What was going on in other genres? The epistolary novel, for example, saw a dramatic decline in new titles from 1771-1780, the same decade that saw one of the largest increases in dictionaries, systems, and those miscellaneous genres in which "completeness" could reasonably be advertised ("complete" frequently modified "dictionary" and "system" as well, though one perhaps incorrectly feels that "system" implies completeness--isn't an incomplete system a system that isn't a system?). Perhaps these are related; perhaps not.
What can we conclude, if anything, about the year-over-year changes from 1729-1733? All was holding steady until '29 (a year after Chambers' Cyclopaedia), then in 1730 we have something of a glut. Did booksellers respond by turning down titles over the next year? Did they then think they'd gone too far and respond by jacking up the number again?
I don't wish to fall into the Franco Moretti track of dubious quantification built largely on even more dubious generic classifications (a la Graphs, Maps, and Trees). Taxonomy in the arts, and particularly in the realm of eighteenth-century literature, always seems to end in tears; a picaresque isn't necessarily only a picaresque, and a novel in the later sense of the term could easily incorporate, interpolate, or sublimate what was once understood to be romance or indeed anything else (those of you familiar with my hobbyhorse will know that in my estimation the designation "novel" for much the period is dependent on this ability).
So if one is to use this sort of data, it has to be done carefully. The strange thing seems to me to be how compelling I find it--how willing I am to be convinced by a mere display of numbers. Mary Poovey tells me--or rather, A History of the Modern Fact tells me--that I owe this allegiance to numerical facticity largely to the same period that saw the emergence of the novel (I have ideas about that but they're for another time). There's something very sneaky about literary statistics. 445 items with "system" in the title, with probably just under 400 of them reflecting what I understand a system in the period to be. I run up here against the same old problem--with 445 to look through, in a single decade, and the inability to manage effectively the perhaps over 1000 distinct titles published throughout the century, how can I ever really be sure of what I'm seeing?
Soon--a bit more of the same on the romance and the novel...
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