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

During the 19th century, throughout the Anglophone world, most fiction was first published in periodicals. In Australia, newspapers were not only the main source of periodical fiction, but the main source of fiction in general. Because of their importance as fiction publishers, and because they provided Australian readers with access to stories from around the world—from Britain, America and Australia, as well as Austria, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and beyond—Australian newspapers represent an important record of the transnational circulation and reception of fiction in this period.

Investigating almost 10,000 works of fiction in the world’s largest open-access collection of mass-digitized historical newspapers (the National Library of Australia’s Trove database), A World of Fiction reconceptualizes how fiction traveled globally, and was received and understood locally, in the 19th century. Katherine Bode’s innovative approach to the new digital collections that are transforming research in the humanities is a model of how digital tools can transform how we understand digital collections and interpret literatures in the past.

About the Author

Katherine Bode is Associate Professor of Literary and Textual Studies at the Australian National University and was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow from 2018 to 2022. Her research focuses on using large-scale datasets and digital methods to enable new perspectives on Australian literature and literature in Australia. She has published widely on Australian and digital literary studies including as the author or editor of books including: Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture (2009), Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012), Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (2014), and most recently, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018). Her Future Fellowship project aims to develop a performative materialist approach to data-rich analysis in the humanities, and to investigate the reception of Australian literature as a generative site for exploring the value of literature and the knowledge claims of literary studies.