Reductive Reading : a Syntax of Victorian Moralizing / Sarah Danielle Allison.

Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction the syntax of Victorian moralizing: on choosing a proxy for style -- In defense of reading reductively -- The shockingly subtle criticism of the London Quarterly Review, 1855-1861 -- Relative clauses and the narrative present tense in George Eliot -- generalization and declamation : Elizabeth Barrett Browning's present-tense poetics -- A moral technology: speech tags in Charles Dickens's dialogue -- Conclusion : a grammar of perception.

"An intervention into what Rita Felski has called "the method wars," Sarah Allison's Reductive Reading is among the surprisingly few books that apply new computational digital humanities methods to a specific field. The book is a manifesto for and a model of how digital analysis can provide daringly simple approaches to complex literary problems. Reductive Reading contributes to Victorian studies, as well as to studies in the novel and narrative, by introducing a computational perspective to debates about the value of fiction and the ethical representation of people in literature. Its analyses examine how patterns that form little part of our conscious experience of reading nevertheless structure our experience of books, and how linguistic patterns in moral commentary or the representation of dialogue comment on the story in the process of narrating it. Reductive Reading reveals a counterintuitive truth about criticism: that one of the most powerful ways to generate subtle reading is to be reductive; that is, to design projects with the questions up front, with a clear statement of how we propose to find the answers"-- Provided by publisher.

Print version record.

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