Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing

How practices from the digital analysis of texts both simplify and enhance traditional literary criticism. Honorable Mention, NAVSA Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association What is to be gained by reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch from an Excel spreadsheet, or the novels of Charles Dickens through a few hundred dialogue tags—those he said/she saids that bring his characters to life? Sarah Danielle Allison’s Reductive Reading argues that the greatest gift the computational analysis of texts has given to traditional criticism is not computational at all. Rather, one of the most powerful ways to generate subtle reading is to be reductive; that is, to approach literary works with specific questions and a clear roadmap of how to look for the answers. Allison examines how patterns that form little part of our conscious experience of reading nevertheless structure our experience of books. Exploring Victorian moralizing at the level of the grammatical clause, she also reveals how linguistic patterns comment on the story in the process of narrating it. Delving into The London Quarterly Review, as well as the work of Eliot, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, and other canonical Victorian writers, the book models how to study nebulous and complex stylistic effects. A manifesto for and a model of how digital analysis can provide daringly simple approaches to complex literary problems, Reductive Reading introduces a counterintuitive computational perspective to debates about the value of fiction and the ethical representation of people in literature.

Table of Contents:
List of Images Acknowledgments Introduction 1. In Defense of Reading Reductively 2. The Shockingly Subtle Criticism of The London Quarterly Review, 1855-1861 3. Relative Clauses and the Narrative Present Tense in George Eliot 4. Generalization and Declamation 5. A Moral Technology Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Sarah Danielle Allison is an assistant professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans.

Review :
One of the great pleasures of Allison's book is that it not only offers persuasive readings of familiar texts, but suggests new ways of reading them that others will want to try. Rereading novels by Dickens and Eliot afterwards, I could not help but see their syntax with a new awareness and appreciation . . . the reductive reading Allison describes and demonstrates in this book greatly expands our critical understanding. —Natalie M. Houston, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Review of English Studies Reductive Reading is sure to appeal to scholars interested in theory after 'distant reading.' —Kate Holterhoff, Collations Book Forum, V21 Collective Allison's book opens the door to some fascinating questions about contemporary critical practice. —Sheila Liming, Collations Book Forum, V21 Collective A masterful integration of digital humanistic approaches and more traditional close-reading methods, Reductive Reading makes a compelling, persuasive case for the way that the style of Victorian literature shaped morality. —Victorian Studies for the 21st Century Reductive Reading is a lucid, original, and persuasive study of the ways in which ethical ideas take shape in the form of the sentence, the turn from clause to clause, the rapid, vertiginous descent from one poetic line to the next, or the ironic turn of the speech tag. Anyone interested in ethics and style will find a wealth of new knowledge and exciting insights in its pages. —Daniel Wright, University of Toronto, Victorian Studies