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Literary Reviewing and the Velocity of Book Histories in Times of Digitization

  • Julia Straub EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: April 1, 2021
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Abstract

Web 2.0 has enabled a wide variety of practices and processes involved in the production, dissemination and reception of literary works to take place in an interactive environment. Concepts of authorship, the book as such, but also literary reviewing have undergone significant changes as a result, leading, for example, to the rise of the amateur critic. The case of Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” (2017), published both in print and online by The New Yorker magazine, and its “going viral”, illustrate the speed and alacrity with which literary works today undergo evaluation and how different these kinds of discursive practices are in comparison to more traditional notions of literary reviewing. In the light of this velocity of reception processes, this article re-examines existing theories of literary value and evaluation (as in the form of reviewing and as postulated, e. g., by Barbara Herrnstein Smith) and their relation to book history.

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Published Online: 2021-04-01
Published in Print: 2021-03-04

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Articles
  4. Book Histories in the Digital Age: Challenges, Promises, Achievements
  5. Holistically Modelling the Medieval Book: Towards a Digital Contribution
  6. Tradition and Innovation in Cataloguing Medieval Manuscripts
  7. Learning to Let Go: Ownership, Rights, Fees, and Permissions of Readers’ Photographs
  8. A New Age of Photography: ‘DIY Digitization’ in Manuscript Studies
  9. Habemus Corpora: Reapproaching Philological Problems in the Age of ‘Big’ Data
  10. Digitizing the Old English Anonymous and Wulfstanian Homilies through the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English (ECHOE) Project
  11. The Reader at Large: A Computational Approach to London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.ii (Part One)
  12. Digitized Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Self-Translation Praxes Mediated through Digital Technology
  13. Computing Literary Surplus Value: Alan Moore and the Density of the Comic Book as Graphic Novel
  14. Literary Reviewing and the Velocity of Book Histories in Times of Digitization
  15. Reviews
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  20. Baylee Brits. 2017. Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction. New York/London: Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £ 85.00/$ 115.00.
  21. James Smith (ed.). 2019. The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930 s. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 250 pp., £ 74.99.
  22. Ulla Rahbek. 2019. British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, vii + 224 pp., € 74.89.
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  25. Maria Löschnigg and Melanie Braunecker (eds.). 2019. Green Matters: Ecocultural Functions of Literature. Nature, Culture and Literature 15. Leiden: Brill, xiv + 385 pp., € 132.00/$ 159.00.
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