The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities

This article furthers ongoing work on the merits of the feminist novel’s intrinsic variability by probing its dynamics in four publishing contexts: contemporary anglophone literary criticism, prestigious review publications, marketing materials, and online book reviews by social readers. We explore...

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Autores principales: Lisa Mendelman, Anna Mukamal
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Publicado: Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University 2021
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spelling oai:doaj.org-article:9c8b121ef5c541569048b418e0e1581b2021-11-19T15:07:32ZThe Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities2371-4549https://doaj.org/article/9c8b121ef5c541569048b418e0e1581b2021-11-01T00:00:00Zhttps://culturalanalytics.scholasticahq.com/article/30009-the-generative-dissensus-of-reading-the-feminist-novel-1995-2020-a-computational-analysis-of-interpretive-communities.pdfhttps://doaj.org/toc/2371-4549This article furthers ongoing work on the merits of the feminist novel’s intrinsic variability by probing its dynamics in four publishing contexts: contemporary anglophone literary criticism, prestigious review publications, marketing materials, and online book reviews by social readers. We explore how these interpretive communities converge and diverge in their assessments of feminist fiction over the past twenty-five years by evaluating articles from the MLA International Bibliography, book reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supp-lement, and other prominent periodicals, blurbs from Amazon, and Goodreads reviews. We trace the feminist novel’s ambivalent fates—or rather, feminist novels’ ambivalent fates—in and across these four domains. To do so, we engage computational methods of topic modeling, most distinctive word analysis, and named entity recognition. We synthesize these quantitative results with qualitative attention to provocative examples from our corpus. In so doing, we consider how literary scholars can develop more robust understandings of what feminism and feminist fiction mean to contemporary readers and what we stand to gain by bringing this diverse interpretive labor into our scholarly conversations.Lisa MendelmanAnna MukamalDepartment of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill UniversityarticleSociology (General)HM401-1281ENJournal of Cultural Analytics (2021)
institution DOAJ
collection DOAJ
language EN
topic Sociology (General)
HM401-1281
spellingShingle Sociology (General)
HM401-1281
Lisa Mendelman
Anna Mukamal
The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities
description This article furthers ongoing work on the merits of the feminist novel’s intrinsic variability by probing its dynamics in four publishing contexts: contemporary anglophone literary criticism, prestigious review publications, marketing materials, and online book reviews by social readers. We explore how these interpretive communities converge and diverge in their assessments of feminist fiction over the past twenty-five years by evaluating articles from the MLA International Bibliography, book reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supp-lement, and other prominent periodicals, blurbs from Amazon, and Goodreads reviews. We trace the feminist novel’s ambivalent fates—or rather, feminist novels’ ambivalent fates—in and across these four domains. To do so, we engage computational methods of topic modeling, most distinctive word analysis, and named entity recognition. We synthesize these quantitative results with qualitative attention to provocative examples from our corpus. In so doing, we consider how literary scholars can develop more robust understandings of what feminism and feminist fiction mean to contemporary readers and what we stand to gain by bringing this diverse interpretive labor into our scholarly conversations.
format article
author Lisa Mendelman
Anna Mukamal
author_facet Lisa Mendelman
Anna Mukamal
author_sort Lisa Mendelman
title The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities
title_short The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities
title_full The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities
title_fullStr The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities
title_full_unstemmed The Generative Dissensus of Reading the Feminist Novel, 1995-2020: A Computational Analysis of Interpretive Communities
title_sort generative dissensus of reading the feminist novel, 1995-2020: a computational analysis of interpretive communities
publisher Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University
publishDate 2021
url https://doaj.org/article/9c8b121ef5c541569048b418e0e1581b
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