Big Books in Times of Big Data

By Inge Van de Ven

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 Bola o, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausg rd, 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9087283377
• ISBN13: 9789087283377
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: Leiden University Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"