Technologies of Reading 2: Digitally Reading Jane Austen

I think I might make this a series of posts that chronicle my experience teaching ENGL 366: Technologies of Reading the 19th Century Novel at Washington State University. The first installment looked at how I am trying to integrate reading aloud into the content and projects of my course. In this installment, I’m looking at digital editions of Jane Austen’s work and proposing a method of using the content of Austen’s Northanger Abbey to introduce literary studies students to facets of the digital humanities.

I’ve been looking through some wonderful pieces on reading in anticipation of my final day teaching Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. An aside: I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with Austen, and I’ve only recently truly recognized the power of her writing. Tim Morton has a really interesting lecture on Austen where he suggests that her novels are like “emotional kung fu,” and I find his insistence on the seriousness of her stories pretty compelling. Clearly, Austen is a central figure in depicting the rural communities of the British lower aristocracy and the impact of reading and books in the development of female subjectivity during the Romantic period - so, I knew that I had to use her in my 19th century British novel course.

More specifically, Austen’s Northanger Abbey represents a moment in the history of reading where ambivalences about Gothic novels confront the rise of novel reading as a legitimate activity. Austen’s criticism of the world she throws her heroines into is always counterbalanced by a feeling of dread that this world is going to disappear as industrialization becomes more widespread. Further, Yael Halevi-Wise has argued that Austen uses scenes of reading in the novel to argue against the Gothic romanticism of authors like Ann Radcliffe yet preserve her own brand of realism as a worthwhile genre for the novel. As Austen reflects towards the end of Northanger Abbey in a passage cited by Halevi-Wise:

Charming as were all of Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of its imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. (160)

The passage is telling and underscores Halevi-Wise’s central point: that depictions of reading in realist novels during the Romantic period attempted to validate the practice of novel reading by demonizing Gothic and romantic novels.

For me, Austen is an interesting figure to integrate into a course that connects a literature survey with some of the concerns in the digital humanities. I say this because she is clearly connecting cultural issues with those of modality and genre. She also demonstrates Paul Fyfe’s point that the novel, especially the novel serialized in so-called penny dreadfuls, was used to express anxieties many readers felt during the 19th century about distinguishing so-called literary works from what Margaret Oliphant calls the “countless swarms of serial stories” “printed on the worst paper, with the worst type and poorest illustrations”: fiction that ignores philosophy and feeds the “love of stories […] which has its strongest development in savages and children” (214; 204). This fear of feeding a worthless need for entertainment combined with the tendency of a poor interface to scatter the critical faculties of the mind is, as Fyfe argues, reflected in many of the critiques of mass and participatory culture we see today.

Yet, if Facebook is the 21st-century analogue to Oliphant’s penny dreadfuls, I’d argue that the act of digital curation could be considered a form of realism akin to novels like Austen’s. I say this not because I believe such pieces are making overt arguments against Facebook, but simply because digital curation (especially those projects sponsored by major Universities and other cultural institutions) uses the cultural capital of humanities organizations and a mass distribution model to prove the realistic nature of its content. In this, I’m suggesting that what Marcel O’Gorman has called academia’s “fever for archiving,” or its tendency to favor archival projects over and above creative ones, reflects a need for institutions to use realism in order to legitimate their activity. Two digital projects from Jane Austen shows realist and participatory tendencies quite well.

The first is Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, a project that collects several of Austen’s early written works into a digital manuscript collection. The project is sponsored by several institutions: the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, the University of Oxford, Kings College London, the British Library, and the Bodelian Library. Of course, the project is fascinating and extremely useful. It collects “some 1000 pages of fiction written by Jane Austen’s own hand.” And it features high-resolution scans of Austen’s manuscripts, often showing places where she crossed out a word or a phrase and replaced it with another one. Like many manuscript projects, I find myself at a loss when thinking about incorporating such a project into my class. Of course, manuscripts are interesting in themselves, especially if students became interested in analyzing Austen’s handwriting or the ways she put her books together. Yet, how should we use manuscript projects like this one to teach - for example - the rising interest in creativity and building in the digital humanities? Apart from the book as a fetish object, the book as an object of history, how do we use digitized manuscripts to inspire our students to make things?

I believe the second project answers these questions in a more compelling way. As part of their series advertising their collections, the British Library released a digital version of Austen’s The History of England on iTunes. Austen created this book when she was 16 years old, and it combines her own lack of interest in historical accuracy (she calls herself a “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian” and uses Shakespeare’s plays as historical evidence) with illustration and anecdote. The History is punctuated with the lives of monarchs, which perhaps shows Jane’s adolescent understanding of how history happens, but her stories of these monarchs are delightful. In her entry on Edward V, she says, “This unfortunate Prince lived so little a while that nobody had time to draw his picture” (7).

Of course, the content of The History of England is interesting - yet the interface that the British Library builds on their site also emphasizes participatory culture. Users are encouraged, for example, to create their own galleries blending the different projects that are featured on the site. While this certainly doesn’t exhaust the participatory possibilities of digital interfaces for literary books, it does signal what I believe will be an important aspect of curation and reading in the digital humanities: personalized curation and sharing. People want to have a stake in what they read. They want to read actively and socially, and that means giving them a space for making things that resonate with the work of the past. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all readers need to learn Python and create their own exhibit, but it does mean that curators should use digital technology to make the process of engaging with literary authors more interactive. We need less realist legitimation, in other words, and more creative engagement when encountering literary history.