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The Lag: Technology and Fiction in the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2020

Alexander Manshel
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Abstract

Literary histories of the twentieth century often emphasize how rapid technological innovation spurred writers to reimagine the novel's form and central concerns. This essay investigates that claim, comparing the presence of various information technologies in American fiction with their nonfictional presence in American households. What this comparison reveals is a pronounced lag: a gap in time between when a new technology becomes ubiquitous in the home and when it becomes ubiquitous in the novel. Moreover, the shape of this lag is consistent across multiple technologies, tracing a normative trajectory of fictional representation over time. Whereas more popular and more prestigious novels travel in tandem for much of the twentieth century with respect to their inclusion of technology, the two subfields diverge substantially at the close of the century, as conceptions of literary prestige become increasingly defined by an opposition to technologies of the present. (AM)

Type
Special Topic: Varieties of Digital Humanities
Information
PMLA , Volume 135 , Issue 1: Special Topic Varieties of Digital Humanities , January 2020 , pp. 40 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Alexander Manshel

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