Abstract
The essay addresses the role digital analysis—what Franco Moretti calls “Distant Reading” or Matthew Jockers calls “Macroanalysis”—can play in understanding the circulation and reception of world literature, particularly for an Asian Anglophone readership. Reconfiguring our understanding around big data, charting patterns and histories of reception, rather than production, runs almost immediately into immense problems of scale and specificity. Scholars around the world may understand how the canon is understood and taught in their particular locale, but academic gestures toward a shared global perspective are necessarily speculative and provisional. Using Google Trends, this essay looks at patterns of searchership for “migratory texts” represented in major Anglophone literature anthologies, enabling comparisons of the way these interact with other canons around the world.
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Squires, L.A. (2021). The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Literary Canon. In: Chilton, M., Clark, S., Yoshihara, Y. (eds) Asian English. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3513-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3513-7_11
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