Big Books in Times of Big Data examines recent trends of size and scale in the novel in terms of the shift from the bound book to the newer materialities of the digital. Using a wide-ranging international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, Van de Ven reflects on the place of big book-bound literature in a media genealogy which includes film and television but also online databases, social media, selfies, and Global Information Systems. This study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book—as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, mediality, gender, and power. Van de Ven takes us into a contested bookish terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and readerly comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of ‘binging’ and serial consumption.
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One
- Monumentality and the Novel: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century
- Chapter Two
- A Sublime of Data: Information Overload between the Covers
- Chapter Three
- Narratives of the Database: Between Counting and Recounting
- Chapter Four
- Quantified Selves: Monumental Autobiography in the Facebook Age
- Chapter Five
- Growing Women, Shrinking Men? Gender, Scale, Materiality
- Chapter Six
- Can the Novel Trump the TV Series? Competing Media in the Post-television Stage
- Chapter Seven
- The Book-as-World-as-Book: Analog Novels and Geographical Information Systems
- Chapter Eight
- Slow Reading, Materiality, and Mediacy: How Books Withstand Real-Time and Binging
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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