Data Imaginary

Literature and Data in Nineteenth-Century US Culture

by Sebastian M. Herrmann

Book cover: Data Imaginary

Extent: 421 pages

Publisher: Universitätsverlag Winter

Subjects: Cultural Studies, Literary Studies

Series: American Studies - A Monograph Series

Series volume number: 316

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(May 2024)

ISBN: 9783825348878

5.28 x 8.27 inches

Price: $79.00

In stock

‘Data Imaginary’ is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the long nineteenth century. It argues that, during romanticism, US culture negotiated the outlines of the literary-what literature is, what literary value consists of, and what literature can do-in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation was searching for a national literature of its own, data and data-driven practices formed an important foil, a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new, democratic literature. Revisiting formative decades of US literary self-perception through the conceptual lens of data, this book rethinks the representative project of transcendentalism, the catalog poetry of Walt Whitman, the formal experimentation of abolitionist literature, and the evolution of American (literary) studies.

  • By (author) Sebastian M Herrmann