Between Canon and Corpus: Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels
(January 2015)Abstract
“Of the many, many thousands of novels and stories published in English in the twentieth century, which group of several hundred would represent the most reasonable, interesting, and useful subset of the whole?” Thus begins the latest Pamphlet of the Literary Lab, in which Mark Algee-Hewitt and Mark McGurl sketch out a broad, ambitious map of modern narrative in English. Laying bare the disparate systems of evaluation whose interactions define our objects of study, “Between Canon and Corpus” charts the inner dynamic of the 20th-century literary field in a newly sophisticated way. Combining network theory, book history, and literary sociology, Algee-Hewitt’s and McGurl’s research marks the Literary Lab’s first attempt to come to terms with the literary field as a unified, internally differentiated system: a line of inquiry to which we will devote increasing attention in the years to come.