The Conglomerate Era:
A Computational History of American Literature in the Age of the Agent
How have changes in the publishing industry affected authorship and literary form? In collaboration with Richard Jean So, I have built corpora on publishers (Random House, W. W. Norton, Pocket Books, Grove, Graywolf, and others), prizewinning and bestselling American literature, and reviews of tens of thousands of American novels toward writing large scale analyses of the field. Drawing on my training in traditional literary studies and critical theory, I use computational methods to offer an account of literary history that reveals how money and power in publishing have shaped the state of contemporary literature and literary studies.
Follow this link to explore an example of this work. It will take you to a visualization of Knopf's most well-reviewed books from 1980-2000. All of the novels in this visualization are among the 1% most-reviewed books in the period—the larger the node, the better-reviewed. Red nodes represent novels by women, and green nodes represent novels by men. You will see that Cormac McCarthy, Anne Tyler, and John Updike are the Knopf authors whose novels received the most attention from reviewers during these two decades.
In 1965, less than 25% of published novels were by women. By 2000, the number rose to 40%. This is a steep increase. We might immediately attribute the increase to the influence of second-wave feminism. But my research suggests that the expansive growth of a market for children's books and young adult (YA) novels can make sense of a good part of the increase in titles by women—consider the two graphs here. As in the above link, red nodes represent novels by women, and green nodes represent novels by men. In the first graph, depicting the most-reviewed US novels from 1965-1975, we can see that men outnumber women in a single large cluster, or, in the terms of network analysis, a single component.
In the second graph, depicting the most-reviewed US novels from 1990-2000, we see two components. The one on the left is comprised of children's books and YA novels. The one on the right is comprised of adult fiction. We see that the children's and YA component is dominated by women, and that the adult component is dominated by men, looking very similar to the graph from 1965-1975. This suggests that the bulk of the advance for women in publishing has been in the expansion of the children's and YA market, and that we have made little headway in resisting sexism in the publishing industry as regards adult fiction.
This project is a work-in-progress. Stay tuned to this site for developments.