This book explores the aesthetics, medial affordances, and cultural economics of monumental literary works of the digital age and offers a comparative and cross-cultural perspective on a wide range of contemporary writers. Using an international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven investigates multiple strands of bigness that speak to the tenuous position of print literature in the present but also to the robust stature of literary discourse within our age of proliferating digital media. Her 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, materiality, gender, and power. Van de Ven takes us into a contested terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and reader comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of binge reading 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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