[Commlist] New book: Digital Victorians

We would like to announce a new publication from Stanford University 
Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*Digital Victorians***

 From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities

*Paul Fyfe***

*https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781503640948/digital-victorians/* 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781503640948/digital-victorians/> *__*

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*LLF24*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30th June 2025. Discount only applies to the CAP 
website.

*__*

/"Full of elegant, surprising readings, Fyfe's book is required reading 
for anyone who is concerned about the material and epistemological 
stakes of how we know what we know about the past (and that should be 
all of us)."—/Meredith Martin, Princeton University

/ "Fyfe makes a powerful case for tracing the origins of digital 
humanities to Victorians' debates about information overload. Digital 
Victorians offers an important and innovative contribution to digital 
humanities as a field, to media history, and to Victorian literary 
studies."/—Jon Lawrence, University of Exeter

Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital 
information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own 
epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the 
nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in 
ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new 
work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues 
to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are 
what we call digital humanities, characterized by the 
self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have 
made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate 
humanities practices amid another technological revolution.

Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du 
Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new 
media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties 
about quantitative and machine-driven reading, professional obsolescence 
in the face of new technology, and more—telling a longer history of how 
writers, readers, and scholars adapt to dramatically changing media 
ecologies, then and now. The result is a predigital history for the 
digital humanities through nineteenth-century encounters with 
telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading 
methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals. As 
Fyfe demonstrates, well before computers, the Victorians were already 
digital.

*Paul Fyfe*is Associate Professor in the Department of English, North 
Carolina State University. He is the author of /By Accident or Design: 
Writing the Victorian Metropolis/(2015).



*Stanford University Press**| Stanford Text Technologies | October 
2024 | 294pp | 9781503640948 | PB | £23.99**

*Price subject to change.

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