Conclusion

While many of the texts discussed in this chapter comprise versions of texts that are the same according to a computational model of reprinting, their multiple versions are quite different from the perspective of literary history. Even quite minor changes to texts’ titles, authorial attribution—or lack thereof—or editorial paratext can shift their meanings dramatically, and prompt the kinds of questions this book has asked throughout about how we constitute bibliographic knowledge across textual field as volatile as the nineteenth-century newspaper. Since its inception the Viral Texts team has debated fundamental questions that are as much editorial as computational: how much internal similarity makes two texts “the same?” When is a text a reprint, and at what level of variation does it become a new work? When does duplication become creation? At what point does “editor” become “author”?

Throughout the project and this book we have erred on the side of capaciousness, considering the event of a text’s proliferation rather than attempting to pin down its precise origins or create a perfect copy. Our speculative bibliographies seek to model the messy textuality of the nineteenth-century newspaper—the sociologies of its texts—within the frameworks provided by twenty-first century research tools. The reference texts we transcribe for each cluster referenced in the book are anchors for bibliographic reference within a computational model, not claims of textual primacy or authority, which we argue is vested in the cluster rather than any individual witness. When we turn this capacious lens to more recognizable literary forms, such as the works gathered in the Wright American Fiction Collection, we are forced to reckon anew with the implications of such a critical perspective. What happens to our concept of the book, and its place in nineteenth-century literary culture, when we consider books as cut, fragmented, and massively distributed throughout another medium? What is the significance to literary history of a one-paragraph excerpt that crosses the eyes of far more readers than its source text? What would it mean to assemble these fragments and to take them seriously as literature? For some readers without access to a given novel or collection, the newspaper excerpt no doubt was the text, and so we must interpret these excerpts both as parts of larger textual ecosystems and as atomized, individual works. The Wright American Fiction Collection is endlessly generative and we have only uncovered a small portion of the texts and questions that this collection has asked of our reprint detection methodology. However, in showing these examples throughout the chapter, we hope to have illustrated not only how the Viral Texts data can be used for literary analysis, but also how by attending to the life cycle of a text in the nineteenth-century we can begin to understand how readers might have related to their fictional worlds, and how the newspaper as a media ecosystem contained and circulated these fictional worlds.

As we have shown, some nineteenth-century authors thrived in this media economy of viral distribution, either drawing from it when creating longer works of collected fiction, unconcerned with questions of original authorship or intellectual property, or benefiting when an excerpt of their work found fame in the exchange system. In other cases, authors participated in this system inadvertently, or even under protest, as the exchange system claimed their texts and their authority. The critical perspective prompted by the Viral Texts project’s approach requires us to reassess Darnton’s famous diagram of the communications circuit, a diagram that focused on the readers, author, editor, printer, binder, and other laborers responsible for creating a particular book.49 Rather than expand Darnton’s circle, we might instead append parallel or orthogonal circuits that include the newspaper editors, compositors, and other laborers who drew book excerpts into a distinct, though at times overlapping overlapping, circle of newspaper readers. Certainly a full account of nineteenth-century American literature must include the period’s most widely-read vehicle for printed information, the newspaper, and must consider the ramifications when readers encountered literature in distinct media and radically distinct forms.

If the field of nineteenth-century literary studies can move beyond the book as the most authoritative version of a text, then perhaps the field can move beyond the book reader as the most authoritative reader or, perhaps more accurately, textual user. At differing junctions of a text’s production, many actors exhibit control and preference over a text. The bibliographic details central to literary analyses are complicated by users’ ability to interrupt or influence the trajectory of a text. Even the newspaper, a vehicle for circulating information in a democratic way, is political and by attending to them, we can begin to understand not only how readers saw themselves in relation to a text, but also how our contemporary mode of conceiving, changing, and circulating textual material came to be.

Similarly, throughout this chapter we have identified and wrestled with the various ideologies and political stances that contribute to a corpus such as the Wright American Fiction Collection. While the nineteenth-century newspaper, itself, was a regulatory medium, corpora are often also subject to these same regulatory moves. For instance, the choice to include documentary slave narratives alongside fictional pro-slavery novels under the banner of “American fiction” is not neutral. Thus the decisions made by our reprinting algorithm are implicated by this ideology. Additionally, we might also consider how the identities and political stances of our team members may impact our results, and question the ability of a primarily white research team to surface critically ignored texts written by marginalized people in the nineteenth-century. At three distinct levels, our data is shaped by and influenced by ideology: at the level of our newspaper data, at the level of our chosen corpus, and at the level of our own stances as researchers.

One way that we may directly confront these challenges, and the resulting skews in our data, is to introduce more targeted corpora to the Viral Texts project’s experiments. For instance, in July 2020, scholar Amardeep Singh released an open-access corpus of black American literature. While a significant number of these texts were published in the twentieth-century, just beyond our cut-off date of newspapers, the corpus does include roughly thirty texts with nineteenth-century publication dates. After introducing these texts as a seed corpus to the larger Viral Texts data, we have already uncovered results that may better reveal the uptake of Black American writers in the newspaper than we can discover using Wright. For example, the clusters from this Black American corpus are much smaller than the clusters identified from Wright, they reveal much more reprinting originating from the work of Black writers, as opposed to the clusters from Wright in which Black writers quote from other texts in epigraphs or the text of their novels.

For example, an initial analysis of the data reveals the significant reprinting of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poetry on temperance as well as reprinting from Nellie Brown; Or, The Jealous Wife by Thomas Detter. Like trends we have noted in Wright, many of these excerpts revolve around domesticity and domestic strife. For instance, the most reprinted excerpts from Nellie Brown are from a scene in the novel in which a husband and wife have gone to court over their marriage. Ultimately, rather than end in a divorce, the couple are reconciled and the popularity of these courtroom scenes in the newspaper point to similar trends of domestic regulation that we noted in some of Wright’s most popular excerpts.

Additionally, many of the clusters which do show Black writers borrowing material from the newspaper also reveal an interesting trend in citation practices. In addition to the frequency with which William Wells Brown cites the newspaper and other media in Clotel, a topic which has been previous discussed by Lara Langer Cohen, our data reveals that many of the largest clusters include similar citational practices, in which writers draw material from the newspaper to evidence the horrors of slavery. For example, a cluster of twenty-seven reprints draws from a newspaper article reporting the murder of a young Black boy named Tim Thompson who was ordered to dance by a white man, then then shot and killed when he refused. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper begins her poem, “The Martyr Of Alabama,” with an excerpt from this newspaper article, which we have evidence originally began circulating in Alabama on December 27, 1894. The oldest version of the article we have identified also includes the name of one of the white men who murdered Thompson: Jim Jostling. While we have previously identified, throughout this book, instances where writers and newspaper editors assert the factual occurrence of news items, the ability to pinpoint a date and key biographical data surrounding this excerpt being deployed by Harper gives key context to the reading of her poem.

Similarly, in a cluster of seven, we identify a newspaper article which is excerpted in the recently recovered novel Appointed: An American Novel by William Anderson and Walter Stowers, two of the editors of the Detroit Plaindealer. The article argues that the productive power of white, immigrant laborers is greater than the labor of people of color. In Appointed: An American Novel the character John Saunders, a college-educated Black man, opens his wallet; pulls out a newspaper clipping from the September 1st, 1886 edition of The Times-Democrat; and reads the article out loud to his white employer’s son, Stanley. The two use the article as a jumping off point into a discussion on how the working conditions of Black Americans post-emancipation has led to a commonly held belief that Black laborers are lazy and less productive than white laborers, an argument that Saunders disagrees with. Saunders uses the statistics and other data mentioned in the article to explain how the newspaper is biased, framing the article with the intention of drawing in more immigration from the West into Southern states as a way of depreciating Black labor. In our reprinting data, we identify this article as beginning its circulation in 1889 under the title “The Afro-American Agitator.” This intra-media exchange recalls an earlier example from this chapter, T.S. Arthur’s “A Rift in the Cloud,” in which the protagonist reads aloud and responds to a popular newspaper article calling for men to praise their wives. However, the stakes for Appointed’s protagonist are quite different. While “A Rift in the Cloud” shows a character who has the full newspaper in front of him, in Appointed John has clipped this newspaper article and has placed it in his wallet, so that he may have it at the ready. While the novel centers many knowledge-generating uses of print culture, as John and Stanley forge a cross-racial friendship and discuss frequently how racism functions in America, this scene illustrates the same sort of citational practices that earlier Black writers, such as Brown, also deploy as a way of evidencing their claims about slavery and racism. Rather than Arthur’s protagonist, for whom the newspaper is timely and seemingly designed just for him, Appointed’s John relies upon the time-less quality of the newspaper’s evidence, drawing on it like a kind of database.50 He depends on the newspaper clipping’s information having a permanent relevance that would warrant clipping it and carrying it in his wallet. This way of reading the newspaper echoes the “rogue reading” that Fagan explores in Incidents, as Harriet Jacobs relies on a certain permanence of information in the newspaper in order to convince her former master that she has escaped to New York.

In this conclusion we can only cite preliminary results, drawn from a relatively small corpus of novels. Nevertheless, even these preliminary results indicate meaningful patterns in writing and reading practices within Black, American novels that our analysis of Wright barely registered. The relatively large size of reprinting clusters from Wright obscures the relatively small size of the few clusters of Black, American novels in the collection, by using a separate corpus of exclusively Black, American novels, we can begin to trace the trajectory of news items in and outside of fictional worlds and compare those strategies of reprinting to some of the trends that we noted in Wright. Our hope is that through these initial analyses will prompt readers and digital humanists to consider the impact that corpus construction has on data as well as the ways to directly confront and account for these limitations. While the Wright Collection is certainly a well documented collection of nineteenth-century American literature that includes many non-canonical works, there remain many things the Wright Collection cannot tell us about fiction in nineteenth-century America, and there remain readers for whom the Wright Collection, like our newspaper data, does not account.

The fungibility of categories such as author, editor, and reader in nineteenth-century fiction means there are nearly endless possibilities for investigating these categories and analyzing their impacts on the literary landscape of the time period. We have in this chapter wrestled with some key concepts for understanding and working with fiction reprinting in nineteenth-century American periodicals, but this chapter only asks a few of the questions we might pose. In presenting these findings, we not only hope to render more visible the fuzziness of bibliographic categories that, more often than not, are treated by literary studies as easily distinguishable, but also to demonstrate the generativity of computational analysis of reprinting for the study of fiction, writers, and readerships. Rather than reveal one universal set of truths, our data only makes clear how much we have yet to uncover.