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This book moves beyond literature that prioritizes assimilation to examine how contemporary fiction depicts being Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, or Puerto Rican within Chicana/o and Latina/o America. The book establishes four dominant categories of narrative—loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory—that address immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural nationalisms, and neocolonialism. As it shows, narrative concerns have moved away from the weathered notions of arrival and assimilation. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures instead tell stories that have little, if anything, to do with integration into the Anglo-American world. The result is the creation of new memory. This reformulation of cultural membership unmasks the neocolonial story and charts the conscious engagement of cultural memory. It outlines the ways contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o communities create belonging and memory of their ethnic origins. The book provides a background of Chicana/o and Latina/o literature, which particularly demonstrate the increasing focus on empowerment—economic, political, and sexual—within Chicana/o and Latina/o America, not within Anglo-America.

This book seeks to develop an answer to the major question arising from the adoption of sophisticated data-science approaches within humanities research: are existing humanities methods compatible with computational thinking? Data-based and algorithmically powered methods present both new opportunities and new complications for humanists. This book takes as its founding assumption that the exploration and investigation of texts and data with sophisticated computational tools can serve the interpretative goals of humanists. At the same time, it assumes that these approaches cannot and will not obsolete other existing interpretive frameworks. Research involving computational methods, the book argues, should be subject to humanistic modes that deal with questions of power and infrastructure directed toward the field’s assumptions and practices. Arguing for a methodologically and ideologically self-aware critical digital humanities, the author contextualizes the digital humanities within the larger neo-liberalizing shifts of the contemporary university in order to resituate the field within a theoretically informed tradition of humanistic inquiry. Bringing the resources of critical theory to bear on computational methods enables humanists to construct an array of compelling and possible humanistic interpretations from multiple dimensions—from the ideological biases informing many commonly used algorithms to the complications of a historicist text mining, from examining the range of feature selection for sentiment analysis to the fantasies of human subjectless analysis activated by machine learning and artificial intelligence.

This book examines how transitioning from print to a digital milieu deeply affects how scholars deal with the work of editing critical texts. On one hand, forces like changing technology and evolving reader expectations lead to the development of specific editorial products, while on the other hand, they threaten traditional forms of knowledge and methods of textual scholarship. Using the experiences of philologists, text critics, text encoders, scientific editors, and media analysts, the book ranges from philology in ancient Alexandria to the vision of user-supported online critical editing, from peer-directed texts distributed to a few to community-edited products shaped by the many. It discusses the production and accessibility of documents, the emergence of tools used in scholarly work, new editing regimes, and how the readers' expectations evolve as they navigate digital texts. The goal: exploring questions such as, what kind of text is produced? Why is it produced in this particular way? The book provides digital editors, researchers, readers, and technological actors with insights for addressing disruptions that arise from the clash of traditional and digital cultures, while also offering a practical roadmap for processing traditional texts and collections with today's state-of-the-art editing and research techniques thus addressing readers' new emerging reading habits.

This book introduces readers to large-scale literary computing and the revolutionary potential of macroanalysis—a new approach to the study of the literary record designed for probing the digital-textual world as it exists today, in digital form and in large quantities. Using computational analysis to retrieve key words, phrases, and linguistic patterns across thousands of texts in digital libraries, researchers can draw conclusions based on quantifiable evidence regarding how literary trends are employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups, as well as how cultural, historical, and societal linkages may bind individual authors, texts, and genres into an aggregate literary culture. Moving beyond the limitations of literary interpretation based on the “close-reading” of individual works, the book describes how this new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to better understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.

Besides familiar and now commonplace tasks that computers do all the time, what else are they capable of? This study of computational text analysis examines how computers can be used as “reading machines” to open up entirely new possibilities for literary critics. Computer-based text analysis has been employed for the past several decades as a way of searching, collating, and indexing texts. Despite this, the digital revolution has not penetrated the core activity of literary studies: interpretive analysis of written texts. Computers can handle vast amounts of data, allowing for the comparison of texts in ways that were previously too overwhelming for individuals, but they may also assist in enhancing the entirely necessary role of subjectivity in critical interpretation. This book discusses the importance of this new form of text analysis conducted with the assistance of computers. The book suggests that the rigidity of computation can be enlisted by intuition, subjectivity, and play.

This book surveys the life and career of Roger Zelazny (1937-1995), an American science fiction writer who quickly rose to prominence in the 1960s with works that offered new perspectives on traditional science fiction scenarios such as planetary exploration, alien encounter, and immortality as they audaciously remixed Western mythology and Eastern religion within a brilliant, allusive prose style. Although he continued to produce innovative and often formally experimental fiction, after 1970 Zelazny increasingly focused on more commercial work, in particular the extraordinarily popular fantasy novels in the Amber series. At the time of his death, Zelazny remained a beloved figure within the field, but the critical consensus was that he had chosen commercial success over literary ambition and that his later work did not rise to the level of the breakthrough stories of the 1960s. This book argues that such a reading is an oversimplification. Whereas Zelazny’s use of mythic structures and sophisticated prose is important, so is his strikingly consistent preoccupation with questions of autonomy that evolves from early stories of the noble resistance of often violent individuals to later stories of such individuals’ existing within a larger community--all produced, from the beginning to the end of his career, within the ongoing tensions between the ambitions of the literary artist and the requirements of the commercial writer.

Edgar Lee Masters’s best-selling Spoon River Anthology (1915) captured a regional conception of Midwestern rural life, packaged it in verse by fictional dead people, and disseminated it so widely that the book helped shift the popular conception of the representative American municipality from the New England village to the Midwestern small town. Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town explores the atmosphere into which Masters’s book was born and the environments in which it thrived, even beyond the life and legacy of its author. Masters’s book aroused interest among modernists like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Carl Van Doren and popular writers like William Allen White. Its legacy resonated in popular culture through films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Rebel without a Cause, amusement parks like Disneyland, and The Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main Street. One hundred years after its publication, signs of Spoon River could still be found in films like Fargo; Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri; television series like Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, and Ozark; and the radio program A Prairie Home Companion. While this book uncovers the milieu in which Spoon River Anthology was created, it also traces the ways in which Americans embraced, debated, and transformed Masters’s portrayal of Spoon River and made it part of the mythology of small-town life in the United States.

This book offers theoretical perspectives and case studies for teaching American literature of the long nineteenth century using the tools and methods of the digital humanities (DH). The essays highlight best methods for integrating the building of digital tools and projects in the nineteenth-century American literature classroom and strategies for incorporating into the curriculum already established digital materials. By emphasizing a discipline-specific approach, the collection invites conversations among scholars of other disciplines about how digital pedagogies can deepen their objectives for student learning. The collection is organized into five keywords, or tags: Make, Read, Recover, Archive, and Act. The essays in Make illustrate the pedagogical value of project-based, collaborative learning. The essays in Read describe assignments in which students engage in multiple reading practices, from close to collaborative and computational. In Recover, contributors show how DH approaches aid in the scholarly consideration of marginalized texts. The essays in Archive encourage students to select and organize artifacts with an ethics of care, often in communities beyond the classroom. The final section, Act, advocates for an activist approach, demonstrating how DH can bring new insights to debates central to the study of the long nineteenth century, particularly concerning difference. As they engage digital humanities practices and pedagogies, the essays in the collection model inventive strategies and rethink what is possible in the American literature classroom.