Averaging Americans : literature, statistics, and inequality
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Averaging Americans: Literature, Statistics, and Inequality was sparked by a computational discovery I made in a corpus of more than 18,000 works of US fiction: statistical words such as average, normal, and typical distinguish postbellum fiction from its antecedents quantitatively and qualitatively. Averaging Americans explores how authors of the long nineteenth century used statistical thinking to rewrite American identity in ways that were both reactionary and radically egalitarian. This increasing dependence on statistical concepts at the same time that US fiction becomes polemically invested in realist representation is less a coincidence than an understudied fact of US literary history. I reveal how claims to representativeness take on aesthetic and political urgency amid struggles over citizenship, the biopolitics of population management, and the inequalities that define Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era. Critiquing claims to representativeness reveals how that concept is both central to yet undertheorized by literary studies. The average American may well be the long nineteenth century's most important fictional character.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Fredner, Erik |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Jones, Gavin Roger, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Gavin Roger, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Algee-Hewitt, Mark |
| Thesis advisor | McGurl, Mark, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Degree committee member | Algee-Hewitt, Mark |
| Degree committee member | McGurl, Mark, 1966- |
| Degree committee member | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Erik Christopher Fredner. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/rp802rv5947 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Erik Fredner
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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