A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History

Front matter

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Introduction

Questions and Opportunities for Twenty-First-Century Literary History aye

This book began with a question and an opportunity. These arose, respectively, from conditions of the nineteenth century and of the twenty-first. In Australia in the nineteenth century, in contrast to the much more diversified literary markets of Britain and America, newspapers were the main local publishers as well as the major sources of fiction: local and imported. Literary historians knew much—though as this book shows, much less than we thought—about the Australian fiction published in this context. But very little was known about the fiction from elsewhere that appeared in these newspapers, even as it was estimated to comprise around 80 percent of all titles (Morrison, “Serial” 315). In asking what fiction was published in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers I wanted to know where it came from, who wrote it, when it was published, and how it got there. By association, I sought to understand the transnational conditions in which local authors wrote and were read and by which an Australian literary culture developed.

In the twenty-first century, the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Trove database represents the largest mass-digitized collection of historical newspapers internationally.! This was my opportunity: Trove made it possible, for the first time, to explore nineteenth-century Australian newspaper fiction in a systematic and extensive way. I devised a “paratextual method,” outlined in chapter 3, that uses formal features of these digitized newspapers to automatically identify and harvest fiction. On this basis, I discovered over 16,500 works, a massively expanded record of nineteenth-century Australian literary culture and its connections with the international circulation of fiction in this period.

The titles I uncovered came from across the globe—from Britain and America as well as Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and Sweden. I found established international authors in Australian newspapers much earlier than had previously been realized, including multiple titles by Charles Dickens published prior to the mid-1850s,* along with fiction by Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, William Makepeace Thackeray, Gustave Toudouze, and Ivan Turgenev. However, it was after this time that fiction in Australian newspapers really expanded. Among the thousands of titles discovered were works by other canonical American, British, and European authors, including Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, and Heinrich Zschokke. I also found numerous stories by prolific American dime novelists such as Sylvanus Cobb, Prentiss Ingraham, Laura Jean Libbey, and Ann S. Stephens, as well as an extensive array of works by popular British authors, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon (the most published international author in colonial Australia) ,* Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ellen Wood, and many others. Alongside these international writers were a host of new Australian works and authors, with notable findings, including previously unlisted fiction by Catherine Martin and Jessie Mabel Waterhouse; a new Australian author, John Silvester Nottage, responsible for multiple full-length novels; and new titles by “Captain Lacie” and “Ivan Dexter,” in addition to the discovery that both were well-developed pseudonyms for James Joseph Wright, who thereby emerges as one of, if not the most, prolific of Australia’s early authors.

This greatly expanded record of nineteenth-century Australian newspaper fiction was created as a basis for what I call data-rich literary history, and what many scholars, especially in the United States, refer to in the terminology of the field’s most prominent practitioner, Franco Moretti, as “distant reading.”* This approach to literary history applies computational methods of analysis to large bibliographical and/or textual datasets—derived increasingly though not exclusively from mass-digitized collections—to explore how literary works existed, interrelated, and generated meaning in the past. By investigating the cultural and material contexts in which literature was produced, circulated, and read, data-rich literary history seeks to challenge and move beyond the literary canons that organize perceptions of past literature in the present. This, then, was my intention: to move from question, to opportunity, to answers and, in so doing, to advance a noncanonical, data-rich, and transnational history of the literary, publishing, and reading cultures of nineteenth-century Australia. But working with Trove interrupted that neat sequence. Instead of simply answering questions, that engagement produced its own, pressing questions about the nature and implications of literary history conducted with mass-digitized collections and the literary data derived from them.

While I had approached constructing a dataset of nineteenth-century Australian newspaper fiction purely as a preparatory task necessary to enable the synoptic form of literary history I sought to write, I came to realize that this supposedly precritical activity formed an extended historical argument in and of itself, in the context of a specific mass-digitized collection. And while current discussion of mass-digitization foregrounds the scale of such collections and the extensiveness of the digital access they provide, I became increasingly conscious of the gaps in Trove. and this is a mass-digitized collection that is among the largest, and most complete, in the world. When I looked to other data-rich literary history projects to see how they were meeting this challenge I found that the complex relationships between documentary record, digitization, data curation, and historical analysis were not fully articulated. In the highest profile work in this field— Moretti’s distant reading and the “macroanalysis” of his longtime collaborator and the cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab, Matthew L. Jockers—these relationships and their effects were essentially denied in preference for a view of large-scale literary data and mass-digitized collections as transparent windows onto the past.

The result of the questions and opportunities that led me to this project—and of the questions they, in turn, generated—is a book in two parts. The first explores limitations in existing approaches to data-rich literary history and offers an alternative in the form of a new scholarly object of analysis. My central contention in this first part is that, whatever computational methods allow us to do with ever-growing collections of literary data, the results cannot advance knowledge if the literary data analyzed do not effectively represent the historical context we seek to understand. I draw on the theoretical and practical foundations of textual scholarship to constitute what I call a scholarly edition of a literary system: that is, a model of literary works that were published, circulated, and read—and thereby accrued meaning—in a specific historical context, constructed with reference to the history of transmission by which documentary evidence of those works is constituted. In doing so, I seek to provide an appropriate foundation not just for data-rich research but for the broader discipline of literary history as it increasingly operates in a dynamic and expansive digital environment.

The second part of A World of Fiction demonstrates how analysis of a scholarly edition of a literary system can revolutionize knowledge of literary history as well as the frameworks and concepts through which we perceive past literature in the present. While the “transnational turn” in Australian literary studies has represented nineteenth-century Australian readers as oriented almost entirely toward British fiction, I offer a more complex picture: one where this orientation exists, but where colonial authors, publishers, and readers also forged a distinctive Australian literary culture. In the process, I describe an entirely new organization for and structures within literary culture in the colonies and demonstrate the capacity of data-rich literary history to advance understanding of major concepts and phenomena in the broader discipline, ranging from literary anonymity and pseudonymity to reception, fiction reprinting and syndication, and the nature of literary traditions.

Although terminology in the field is evolving, literary histories that employ data and mass-digitized collections still typically begin by citing Moretti’s influential concept of distant reading and/or Jockers’s notion of macroanalysis.° There is good reason for this. These scholars have dominated academic and general discussion of data-rich literary history. Not only have they written some of the only book-length contributions to the field, but remarkably for literary scholarship, Moretti’s and Jockers’s work is reported on in major public forums: the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and more.® Distant reading is a term routinely employed to describe the methods of computational textual analysis in general (Goldstone, “Doxa”). While the use of extensive data to investigate historical literary systems has significant antecedents, not least in book history,’ Moretti has been highly effective in demonstrating the potential critical sophistication of this approach to the wider field of literary studies, and in thereby generating interest in digital methods.

Although influenced by both Moretti’s and Jockers’s work, this book begins rather differently: with a critique of their approach. Chapter 1, “Abstraction, Singularity, Textuality: The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading,” argues that distant reading and macroanalysis offer an inadequate foundation for data-rich literary history because they neglect the activities and insights of textual scholarship: the bibliographical and editorial practices that literary scholars have long relied on to interpret and represent the historical record. Textual scholars understand literary works as events—unfolding and accruing meaning across time and space—and the documentary record as partially and provisionally expressing that process. By contrast, distant reading and macroanalysis conceive data and mass-digitized collections as providing direct and unmediated access to the historical literary record and reduce literary works to texts, perceiving them as singular and stable entities, related to each other in history via basic categories of production. The models of literary systems that Moretti and Jockers construct on this basis are limited, abstract, and often ahistorical.

Such inattention to the historical and material nature of the documentary record is inherited from, not in opposition to, the New Criticism and its core method of close reading. Close readings are generally protected from the worst consequences of such underlying assumptions by the disciplinary infrastructure that textual scholars have produced, and by the documentary context in which such readings are enacted. The same cannot be said of distant reading and macroanalysis, which take the problematic assumptions of close reading to an extreme conclusion. The problem with these prominent approaches is not that they introduce new quantitative methods, inimical to nuanced literary-historical understanding, as has been argued. Rather, distant reading and macroanalysis construct and seek to extract meaning from models of literary systems that are essentially deficient: inadequate for representing the ways in which literary works existed and generated meaning in the past. The solution to this problem is not rejecting data-rich literary history, nor proposing new, more elaborate forms of computational analysis; it is not even integrating computational and noncomputational methods, as is often proposed. These solutions define the issue in terms of the method of analysis used, when the foundational problem is the lack of an adequate object to analyze: one that is capable of managing the documentary record’s complexity, especially as it is manifested in emerging digital knowledge infrastructure, and of representing literary works in the historical contexts in which they were produced and received.

Chapter 2, “Back to the Future: A New Object for (Data-Rich) Literary History,” responds to this challenge by articulating the case for and describing a scholarly edition of a literary system. I begin by surveying existing projects in data-rich literary history that model literary systems differently than do distant reading and macroanalysis. Instead of treating literary works as singular and stable objects, these projects represent and explore the means by which those works connected to each other and accrued meaning in the past. I argue that explicit engagement with modeling, as the method has been theorized in digital humanities, has significant potential to enhance data-rich literary history by offering a mechanism through which to interrogate and refine conceptions of literary works and systems. But modeling alone is insufficient as a basis for the field. A data-rich model of a literary system is inevitably an argument shaped by not only the scholar’s perception of cultural artifacts and phenomena but the complex history by which those artifacts and phenomena are transmitted to and by us in the present. Modeling does not provide a mechanism through which to recognize and represent the inevitably transactional nature of the documentary record: the fact that, whether analog or digital, that record never exists in a stable form but is produced in time and in our interactions with collections. Nor does modeling offer a framework for assessing and managing the inevitable, sometimes radical, disjunctions that exist between knowledge infrastructure, the historical context it is intended to represent, and the data employed in that representation.

Despite the “heavy . . . associations” the scholarly edition carries “from print culture” (Price np), it provides an effective framework through which to understand and accommodate such contingency and partiality. A scholarly edition of a literary work is sometimes perceived simply as a version with extra references, or with added historical context. In fact, it is an argument—a historical and critical but also a technical one—that offers a foundation for other literary-critical and historical arguments to build upon. It presents that argument through a curated text, one for which the content is, by definition, contested, and a critical apparatus that demonstrates and manages those contested features by describing and justifying the editor’s engagement with the documentary record relating to a literary work, including with the inevitable gaps, remediations, and uncertainties that engagement exposes and creates. Another way to describe this interrelationship is to say that a critical apparatus explains the history of transmission that the editor’s understanding is based upon and contributes to, while the curated text embodies the outcome of that history of transmission, including the current moment of interpretation, in the form of a stable, historicized, and publicly accessible object for analysis. While the curated text of a conventional scholarly edition embodies or models the editor’s argument about a literary work, a scholarly edition of a literary system uses a curated dataset to model the editor’s argument about the nature of and relationships between literary works in the past.

For this book I did not simply theorize a scholarly edition; I built one. Its curated dataset is a subset of the 16,500 titles I discovered in the nineteenth-century Australian newspapers digitized by Trove. This subset encompasses a little over 9,200 works of “extended” fiction. Most of these (98 percent) are extended due to serial publication over two or more (often many more) newspaper issues. A small fraction of these titles (2 percent) were completed in a single issue but amount to ten thousand or more words (sometimes considerably more, with stories identified in this project of over sixty thousand words in a single—usually a Christmas—newspaper issue).* The curated dataset is made available in two forms: as downloadable bibliographical and textual data from the University of Michigan Press website and through an interface for searching, browsing, partial editing, and selective or wholesale exporting through the Australian National University’s Centre for Digital Humanities Research.’

This database also makes available the other (approximately seventythree hundred) works of short fiction identified in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers (along with a further five thousand short and extended titles from the early twentieth-century). But I chose to focus on nineteenth-century extended fiction—to subject those titles to extensive historical and bibliographical research and representation— because those works constitute a literary system in the form of production and reception they imply. While stories completed in a single newspaper issue suggest incidental publishing and reading—with such content often selected simply to fill column inches and likely read in a casual manner—extended fiction required deliberate sourcing and publishing by editors and implies more intensive or committed engagement from readers.

The critical apparatus for this curated dataset is composed of certain fields in the dataset that explain and justify decisions about derivation and attribution of these stories, as well as a historical introduction to the model’s parameters and principles, presented in chapter 3. “From World to Trove to Data: Tracing a History of Transmission” describes the history of transmission by which these nineteenth-century Australian newspapers were published, and subsequently collected and remediated, ultimately as digitized documents in Trove, and by which I identified the fiction they contain and represented it as bibliographical and textual data. In seeking to describe the translations and transformations, as well as the gaps and uncertainties, involved in this sequence, I foreground the fact that all collections—analog and digital, those we find and those we construct—have histories. These histories fundamentally determine access to the documentary record, in conjunction with the assumptions and arguments we bring to that inquiry.

As well as a basis for the arguments presented in A World of Fiction, this scholarly edition of a literary system is, fundamentally, for others to use. It makes the outcomes of a rigorous engagement with a mass-digitized collection available for the benefit of all literary historians, whether they are computationally inclined or not. Accordingly, while the argument it embodies about the existence of, and the interrelationships between, literary works in the past is an outcome of analysis, it is also a basis for future exploration. As I elaborate with examples in the conclusion, like a scholarly edition of a literary work, a scholarly edition of a literary system is designed to enable and advance—rather than to decide or conclude—investigation.

In using this scholarly edition to investigate extended fiction in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers, each of the three chapters in the book’s second part adapts and applies a core digital humanities method: bibliometrics in chapter 4, network analysis in chapter 5, and topic modeling in chapter 6. Each chapter begins with a critical analysis of the respective method: although it is a premise of the book that data-rich literary history should not focus on the methods of analysis used to the detriment of the object analyzed, in a field that attempts to understand literature and culture by applying techniques devised for other purposes a critical approach to methodology is essential. My focus, however, is not on trialing the newest or most innovative digital methods per se but on crafting computational approaches best suited to exploring this publishing and reading context, and to responding to the requirements of humanities inquiry. To these ends I present a form of bibliometrics that accommodates the prevalence of anonymous and pseudonymous works in the curated dataset and enables insights into reception as well as publication; I offer an application of network analysis that manages extensive gaps in the newspapers digitized and titles captured; and I devise an approach to topic modeling that creates an intelligible relationship between thematic and documentary features of individual literary works, and of the literary system in which they generated meaning.

In presenting the results of this analysis, these three chapters intervene in a prominent critical trajectory in literary studies, for Australia and internationally: the so-called transnational turn. As has been the case for many national literary fields, in recent decades Australian literary scholars have recognized that Australian literary history is not coterminous with the history of literature by Australians. Yet in Australia, this turn has arguably gone further than elsewhere, particularly for the nineteenth century, where colonial literature has been recast as marginal to the history of literature in Australia. Using various empirical sources—publishers’ archives, lending library records, and reading group minutes—scholars have described an Australian literary tradition as “chronically belated” (Dolin, “Secret” 128) and have discussed colonial readers in terms of their “derivative . . . reading habits,” disregard for local fiction, and marked preference for writing from elsewhere, especially Britain (Askew and Hubber 115; Lyons; Webby, “Colonial”; Webby, “Not”).

While such research offers an important counterweight to the field’s earlier literary nationalism, the view that Australian readers were entirely focused on overseas, particularly British, literature moves too far in the opposite direction. In investigating the main form of local publishing and source of fiction in nineteenth-century Australia— newspapers—this book explores the profound importance of British fiction to literary production and reception in the colonies. But it denies that the relationship to British culture was one of subservience and imitation. To the contrary, I demonstrate at scale what emerging analyses of individual works and reading practices increasingly recognize: how literary forms and practices were translated and transformed by their colonial enactment. ® More contentiously, I emphasize the distinctiveness of literary culture in the colonies, including in the forms of writing and authorship that readers valued, in how fiction was sourced, and in the themes explored in Australian stories.

Chapter 4, “Into the Unknown: Literary Anonymity and the Inscription of Reception,” examines conceptions of literary and cultural value operating in colonial Australia by investigating the origins, known and inscribed, of newspaper fiction. It takes as its starting point an acknowledged characteristic of transnational literary culture in this period— anonymous, pseudonymous, and indeterminate authorship—that is nevertheless occluded by the way we study literature in the past: by extracting (predominantly canonical) works from the anonymous conditions under which they were originally published and read. Not only is this strategy impossible when dealing with thousands of works where authorship is unknown, but it treats anonymity and pseudonymity as an absence, rather than a constitutive presence, in literary culture. This approach also ignores the extensive information about authorship contained in the titles, subtitles, and other paratextual and textual components of publication events, whether or not these details align with those of the historical individuals who wrote the works. To avoid these pitfalls, I consider bibliographical designations of authorship as well as how authorship was represented—or inscribed—in newspapers.

Exploring these two models of authorship shows that cultural value in the colonies was strongly associated with men’s writing, that Australian fiction was both more present and accorded more importance than has been recognized, and that newspapers privileged British, while marginalizing American, writing. With respect to colonial fiction, I demonstrate a significant shift in its promotion and publication in the late 1870s and 1880s: from metropolitan to provincial newspapers. Based on the existing understanding of provincial newspaper fiction as rare, and pirated when present, this finding would seem to have little import. In showing that these provincial newspapers published substantially more fiction than their metropolitan counterparts, this chapter reassesses the development of early Australian literature and literary culture, as well as the gendered ethos organizing this process.

Chapter 5, “Fictional Systems: Network Analysis and Syndication Networks,” investigates fiction reprinting to explore the ways in which colonial literary culture both intersected with and was distinct from the global circulation of fiction in the nineteenth century. For the metropolitan context, the results challenge the existing emphasis in studies of colonial literary culture on the first and best-known British syndication agency, Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau, along with the view that fiction provided by this company—and syndicated British writing generally— overwhelmed local publishing and writing. I show that Tillotson’s was only one entity among many operating in Australia, that it became systematically involved with colonial newspapers a decade earlier, and by a different motivation, than has been argued, and that the involvement of colonial newspapers in publishing local writing, and in sourcing and distributing fiction, continued despite the presence of multiple international companies in the market.

Turning to provincial newspapers, I demonstrate that fiction reprinting, as well as publishing, was more common in that context than in the metropolitan one. Such reprinting was performed, in part, by editor- and author-led enterprises, of varying degrees of formality. But provincial newspapers sourced most of their fiction from an extensive array of hitherto unrecognized syndicates, operating both locally and internationally. While past histories of Australian publishing are primarily book-based, this investigation shows that a local newspaper syndication agency, Cameron, Laing, and Co., published the most Australian fiction for the nineteenth century and probably well into the twentieth. It also reveals that provincial syndicates provided more fiction to the colonies than any of the book publishers, local or global, or the metropolitan newspapers that have been the focus of previous literary and book histories.

Chapter 6, “‘Man people woman life’ / ‘Creek sheep cattle horses’: Influence, Distinction, and Literary Traditions,” turns from the source and reception of fiction in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers to its content, and to the question of whether colonial writing demonstrated any distinct features. Given the transnational market in which colonial literature developed, it has been argued that a distinctive Australian literary tradition was impossible. I show, to the contrary, thematic tendencies in colonial fiction that are clearly different from those in American and British writing. Focusing on rural colonial spaces, characters, and activities, such writing resonates in certain ways, including in its masculine orientation, with the primary framework through which nineteenth-century Australian fiction was perceived prior to the transnational turn: the bush tradition. Yet this fiction also departs from past perceptions of that tradition, including in its presence before the supposedly foundational decade of the 1890s, and most strikingly in its consistent and prominent depiction of Aboriginal characters. Such depictions refute the prevailing view that Aboriginal people were excluded from colonial fiction and offer new perspectives on literary engagements with colonization.

The British and American fiction in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers tends to be characterized not by representations of identifiably British or American people and places but by contrasting attitudes toward history and time. While British fiction frequently emphasizes the interconnectedness of past, present, and future and is ambivalent about the capacity of individual actions to effect historical change, much American fiction shows the opposite: a focus on the present and optimism about the future and the individual’s role in shaping it. Both of these attitudes toward time are manifested in nineteenth-century Australian fiction, with writing by women and in metropolitan newspapers more likely to share the prevailing British perspective and fiction by men and in provincial newspapers more likely to demonstrate features in common with American writing. These correlations between fictional contents and material and authorial trends suggest a fundamental cultural divide in the orientation of colonial fiction to “new” and “old” worlds.

A World of Fiction works across, while contributing to, two fields—digital humanities and literary history—that are in many ways closely integrated, while in others, still academic worlds apart. It may well be that scholars who primarily align themselves with digital humanities will gravitate to the discussion of digital knowledge infrastructure, digitization, data, remediation, and modeling in part 1 and to the critiques of digital methods that begin the other chapters. Alternatively, literary, book, and media historians might find more of specific interest in part

2’s exploration of literary production and reception and of the transnational circulation of nineteenth-century fiction in periodical form. While such variation in the interests of readers is perhaps inevitable, the two parts of this book fundamentally require and inform each other. Although it is often understood as such, literary history is not solely an analytical and critical enterprise; it has always been bound up in—enabled and produced by—the knowledge infrastructure that it creates and employs. Equally, although digital humanities is frequently presented as a methodological and infrastructural endeavor, it is just as much a historical and analytical one. The approaches and infrastructure developed and employed in that field have histories, just as the conceptual entities examined—including literary data and computational models—are critical and interpretive constructs. Confronting the challenges and possibilities that new digital technologies and resources bring to literary history and to the humanities broadly requires a mutually informative relationship of traditional and digital scholarship. Only such a relationship can enable the emergence and consolidation of the new forms of evidence, analysis, and argumentation required by the contemporary conditions of cultural research.

PART I

The Digital World

Chapter 1

Abstraction, Singularity, ‘Textuality The Equivalence of “Close” and “Distant” Reading aye

In a blog post entitled “A Dataset for Distant Reading Literature in English, 1700-1922,” Ted Underwood describes as “malarkey” the “version of distant reading currently circulating in the public imagination”— namely, that it analyzes “a massive database that includes ‘everything that has been thought and said.’” He continues,

In the early days of distant reading, Franco Moretti did frame the project as a challenge to literary historians’ claims about synchronic coverage. (We only discuss a tiny number of books from any given period—what about all the rest?) But even in those early publications, Moretti acknowledged that we would only be able to represent “all the rest” through some kind of sample.

Underwood is correct in a narrow sense: Moretti engages in, and occasionally acknowledges his use of, data sampling. But it does not follow that the public imagination, or the mainstream media outlets feeding it, confected the view of distant reading as enabling direct and objective access to a comprehensive literary-historical record. Moretti’s work provides more than ample grounds for this public perception, as does Jockers’s closely related paradigm of macroanalysis. While claiming direct and objective access to “everything,” these high-profile authors represent and explore only a very limited portion of the literary system, and do so in an abstract and often ahistorical way.

Moretti has been criticized in similar terms previously: for adopting a reductive approach to literature and associating data with comprehensive and authoritative knowledge. Those who reject any role for data in literary history maintain both of these criticisms, on the basis that data are inimical to literature, and only close reading can explore its nuance and complexity. Katie Trumpener, for instance, argues that data-based methods “violate” the “individuality” of literary works (160), while Stephen Marche insists “literature is not data. Literature is the opposite of data” (160). James English attributes such responses to the discipline’s foundationally “negative relationship” to “counting,” noting its intensification in the face of “ever more stringent quantification regimes of value and assessment,” as well as Moretti’s role in exacerbating that oppositional perspective (xii, xiii).

Those who advocate the use of data in literary studies typically deny that Moretti’s approach is needlessly reductive. Echoing Moretti’s account in Distant Reading of the method as “a little pact with the devil” (48), they acknowledge that abstracting and simplifying complex phenomena is an inevitable consequence of quantitative approaches, but one that is justified by the new forms of knowledge it enables (Love 374). Regarding Moretti’s tendency to “overestimat[e] the scientific objectivity of his analyses” (Ross np) opinion is more divided. Some who support a data-rich approach to literary history perceive Moretti’s claim to authoritative knowledge as an unfortunate side effect of his polemical intent to challenge literary history’s reliance on close reading. As Tim Burke writes, “There is no requirement to purchase the entire methodological inventory he makes available, or to throw overboard close reading or aesthetic appreciation” (41). Others ascribe a more foundational essentialism to Moretti’s work. John Frow argues that Moretti conceives of “literary history . . . as an objective account of patterns and trends” by “ignor[ing] the crucial point that these morphological categories he takes as his base units are not pre-given but are constituted in an interpretive encounter by means of an interpretive decision” (“Thinking” 142).