Scholars have long understood that there is a close relationship between literary production and the large-scale cultural contexts in which books are written. But it’s difficult to pin down the many ways in which this relationship might work, especially once we expand our interest from individual texts to systems of production and reception. In this talk, Wilkens offers a computationally assisted analysis of changes in geographic usage within more than a thousand works of nineteenth-century American fiction, arguing that literary-spatial attention around the Civil War was at once more diverse and more stable than has been previously shown. He examines correlations between literary attention and changes in demographic factors that offer preliminary insights into the driving forces behind a range of shifts in literary output. Wilkens also discusses the future of the project, which will soon expand to include millions of books from the early modern period to the present day.
