Big Books in Times of Big Data
Title
Big Books in Times of Big Data
Price
€ 116,99
ISBN
9789400603608
Format
eBook PDF (Adobe DRM)
Number of pages
252
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Also available as
Paperback - € 48,00
Table of Contents
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter one Monumental Novels 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
Bibliography
Index

Inge van de Ven

Big Books in Times of Big Data

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.
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Author

Inge van de Ven

Inge van de Ven is Assistant Professor of Online Culture in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg School of Humanities & Digital Sciences. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Utrecht University, where she also completed postdoctoral research on creativity in education. She was a 2018-’19 Core Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Budapest.