Writing, Reception, Intertextuality: Networking Women’s Writing

Reading has received renewed scrutiny in the digital age, a result of the defamiliarization of the medium that has also brought about a rethinking of what is meant by “text,” “book,” and “author.” Fascination with large-scale data analysis has shifted attention toward modes of reading that sample the source to produce a statistical artifact from which we can in turn read clusterings of words, shifts in topic or register, or changing orthographic habits. These remote reading practices, however, fail to capitalize on valuable modeling of the individual text, but more recently researchers have been exploring ways of bringing these two ends of the digital spectrum into closer conversation. This article explores the study of readership and reception of pre-Victorian women’s writing through these emerging digital methods, examining two collections (Women Writers Online and Women Writers in Review) related to early women’s writing with large-scale analytical methods that engage with the detailed textual models in these collections’ metadata and markup.