What Happens After 1900?
So I had one haunting question as I read Franco Moretti’s essay, which proposes “a transformation in the study of literature…a shift from the close reading of individual texts to the construction of abstract models.” He makes a compelling case for the fusion of literary studies with data visualization, and for what it’s worth, I agree with the main thrust of his argument. Data and literature should collide. In the next few decades, I think they will become increasingly intertwined. Moretti’s analysis of mostly British novels over 150 years shows that genres have a lifetime of 25-30 years, one generation. It’s intriguing, but he drops the thread just when the story starts to get interesting. When readership becomes so widespread and authors so diverse that no single genre can dominate the market, the categories begin to splinter into dozens, hundreds.
But here’s my question: what comes next? Moretti’s only nod to the century since 1900 (his article dates to 2003) is to graph the rise of the novel in Nigeria. Maybe he didn’t have access to the same wealth of data for recent years, but I still believe what’s missing is critical.
Genres today would be unrecognizable to audiences of the 19th century. What of horror, thrillers, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, space opera, military science fiction, dystopia? I’m talking about “lowbrow” popular genres, of course, but so is Moretti. It seems rational to conclude that more books published in a given genre suggest more readers of that genre, which is by definition popularity.
I did a little informal research. A quick perusal of Amazon’s rankings in fiction shows a horror, a historical fiction, and an epic fantasy top the “Most Read” list, while the same horror, another horror, and a thriller reign on the “Most Sold” list. The equivalent New York Times bestsellers right now (including print and e-books) are a crime novel, a personal triumph novel—that may not qualify as a genre, but I’m not sure how else to describe it—and a romantic thriller. Who’s tracking these trends? As far as I know, certain strands of fantasy, sci-fi, romance, and horror have outlasted a single generation, and I doubt they’re going to disappear soon. Does this break Moretti’s pattern?
Sources:
Moretti, Franco. “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History 1.” New Left Review 24, Nov-Dec 2003.
Image: Amazon.com Charts. Screenshot taken 5 October 2017.
2 Replies to “What Happens After 1900?”
Dane, I had the same question. I don’t really care about 1800’s literature as much as 1900’s or even 2000’s! I always wondered if the trend just continues upwards so it’s not worth mentioning. Your Amazon screenshot made me think about a different trend I’d like to see: consumption vs. publication. I imagine more books are published now than ever before, especially with e-publishing and more agencies in the game. What about consumption? Are we reading as many books now as we were 10, 50, 100 years ago. My hypothesis? Consumption matched publication until the digital age.
I didn’t really consider this point while reading the text, but now I really want to know, too, about what happens after 1900. I think that if continued studies were made they would reveal a lot about modern writing and audiences.