Federica Perazzini

Nel tentativo di definire in modo preciso ed esaustivo la disciplina oggetto del nostro convegno oggi, credo che nulla si rivelerà più efficace e paradossalmente calzante dell'aforisma coniato giusto qualche giorno fa da Simon Mahony, condirettore del Centre for Digital Humanities presso University College London: «Digital Humanities is that thing that we, Digital Humanities people, do». Ciò che sembra emergere da questa simpatica tautologia è, in realtà, un genuino disagio, se non direttamente l'impossibilità, di dipanare il mistero di cosa effettivamente si nasconda dietro l'ammaliante etichetta "Digital Humanities"; una difficoltà che io stessa mi sono trovata ad affrontare molteplici volte nel corso degli ultimi due anni e che questa relazione vuole oggi esplorare e, qualora possibile, superare. In ciò che segue, infatti, cercherò di esaminare cosa significa, a quasi settant'anni dalle prime sperimentazioni, essere nelle digital humanities, quali interessi e quali opportunità, anche di tipo

This article attempts an updated, exhaustive definition of the now fashionable, as well as deceptive, idea of the Digital Humanities by outlining a short history of the discipline and providing examples of its methods and results. Far from being an instrument subservient to traditional humanist knowledge, the Digital Humanities are now a fully-fledged, independent science that is strongly rooted in empirical data. This article highlights the application, and the potential, of the Digital Humanities in relation to the analysis of single texts as well as of broad textual corpora, and highlights how the Digital Humanities could radically transform the field, and the practices, of literary studies. Dopo aver contato gli aggettivi e soppesato le righe e misurato le rime, il formalismo o si arresta in silenzio con l'aria di chi non sa più cosa fare di sé o emette una generalizzazione a sorpresa che contiene il cinque per cento di formali-smo e il novantacinque per cento della più acritica intuizione. Lev Trotskij, Letteratura e Rivoluzione Quando un anno fa, appena discussa la tesi di dottorato, mi venne chiesto di scrivere un articolo sulle Digital Humanities, devo confessare che giu-dicai la faccenda con una certa leggerezza. In fin de conti avevo appena terminato uno studio di 320 pagine di esperimenti computazionali su un intero genere letterario, il romanzo gotico inglese, e un articolo sulla me-desima disciplina, appunto le vecchie humanities computing ribattezzate poi digital humanities, non poteva cogliermi impreparata.

This chapter aims to analyse the relationship between fashion and literary studies in the context of English cultural history. By tracing the conflation of the notion of ideology into models of hegemony and discoursive practices, it will highlight the conceptual basis for a proper understanding of the cultural approach in the study of literary objects and fashion phenomena

Il titolo di questo libro, così come il suo contenuto, mira a collegare tre dei concetti fondamentali dei nostri ventiquattro secoli di riflessione letteraria, nella fattispecie: l’istituzione del genere letterario, la teoria dell’evoluzione delle forme e il metodo della distant reading. Il caso di studio è il romanzo gotico inglese

Ispirato dall’incubo notturno di una «giant hand in armour»1, il 24 dicembre 1764 l’eclettico antiquario, figlio d’arte, Sir Horace Walpole compose un fantasioso racconto dalle contraffatte origini medievali destinato a segnare l’ini- zio di un nuovo modo d’intendere la narrativa di finzione. The Castle of Otranto era il nome di questo esperimento che, per ammissione stessa del suo autore, nasceva con l’intento di mescolare (letteralmente blend) «due tipi di romance, quello antico e quello moderno». Con una spontaneità tanto avanguardistica quanto ingenua, in poco più di un mese d’intensa scrittura Sir Walpole non solo aveva realizzato il primo prototipo di romanzo gotico inglese, ma aveva anche creato uno spazio narrativo per la legittimazione di quella che, anni più tardi, dopo un lungo periodo di latenza, sarebbe divenuta una delle forme più popolari e culturalmente longeve del romanzo europeo. il libro cerca di ridefinire la parabola evolutiva del romanzo gotico inglese presenta...

The article examines the development of the Gothic mode across the centuries in terms of transmedial contagion. In particular, the analysis focuses on the survival of specific Gothic tropes and figures in the nineteenth-century street literature phenomenon of penny-blood. The lowbrow literary series will be considered in its inherent dynamics of adaptation and appropriation in order to highlight its role in transforming some of the most iconic characters into vehicles of cultural transmission: memes that have come to redefine the viewer's relationship to Victorian literature and culture.

In his work Maps, Graphs, Trees, Franco Moretti develops the concept of distant reading which can be resumed as the need for a new bird’s eye perspective in the study of literary phenomena as an alternative to the close reading of a few canonical masterpieces. In the current age of digital revolution, the idea of a more comprehensive study of literary history has been gaining popularity thanks to the computer-based macro-analysis. In fact, the unprecedented accessibility of libraries and databases of digital texts are rapidly changing the critical approach to textual studies, thus producing a massive epistemological shift from the traditional theory-driven inductive research to a new experience of data-driven deductive quest. David Hume and Karl Popper among others have already drawn attention to the fact that in many domains of human reasoning, practices are established before explanations are provided. In this way, the data-driven deductive approach can explain a set of given phenomena eluding the obstructions of theory-driven biases. This chapter explores the theoretical premises at the basis of the computer-based macro-analysis in literary studies, as well as the possible experimental praxis focusing on the study of an entire novelistic genre—the English gothic novel—as case study

This article attempts an updated, exhaustive definition of the now fashionable, as well as deceptive, idea of the Digital Humanities by outlining a short history of the discipline and providing examples of its methods and results. Far from being an instrument subservient to traditional humanist knowledge, the Digital Humanities are now a fully-fledged, independent science that is strongly rooted in empirical data. This article highlights the application, and the potential, of the Digital Humanities in relation to the analysis of single texts as well as of broad textual corpora, and highlights how the Digital Humanities could radically transform the field, and the practices, of literary studies.

– Recent developments in the field of Digital Humanities have offered researchers new methodological perspectives, by combining the methods and statistical tools typical of corpus linguistics with the hermeneutic practice of literary criticism. Despite a large number of works has illustrated the advantages of using computational methods in literary studies, most literary scholars still disregard the epistemological connection that exists between the quantitative and qualitative approaches, thus treating them as mutually exclusive. On this backdrop, this paper aims to show that the two approaches can coexist, by performing an act of “computational criticism” on a corpus of novels and periodical essays representative of the time, and discussing their role in influencing and determining the linguistic-ideological configuration of the long English 18 th century. In particular, the paper aims to clarify, by exemplification, how the use of quantitative methods may support researchers in l...

In this article, I trace the changes in the literary and material representations of the indigenous peoples of North America within the British sphere of cultural production. As a first example, I will give an account of the episode of the “Four Iroquois Kings” envoy at Queen Ann’s court in 1710, focusing on the resonance of such a historical encounter in popular texts and iconographic material. As a second example, I analyze the popular story of Inkle and Yarico included in Richard Steele’s The Spectator in 1711, showing its impact on the early Enlightenment reflections on colonial trade. In my conclusion, I examine the role of American natives in the scholarly works of the Scottish Enlightenment, in order to show how they were used as comparable types for the observation of the roots of European civilizations thus justifying the construction of the British imperial hegemony both geopolitical terms and discursive practice.

Nella storia della creativita umana, l'atto di immaginare l'impossibile si pone al centro della percezione fisica e metafisica dell'ignoto. Il dibattito sulla natura dell'impossibile ha poi acquisito particolare rilevanza nel contesto dell'Illuminismo britannico quando la nascente scienze moderna si uni alla letteratura nel tentativo di fornire una validazione empirica al dominio dell’inspiegabile e del soprannaturale. In tal senso, le discrepanze tra le ontologie sovrapposte delle cosiddette  Age of Faith  e  Age of Reason  trovarono ulteriore esplicitazione nell’intersezione tra l’ancestrale discorso letterario del fantastico e l’esordiente genere del  novel . In particolare, l’assimilazione delle convenzioni tematiche della letteratura soprannaturale all'interno della cornice narrativa del realismo formale ha portato allo sviluppo di due sottogeneri romanzeschi piuttosto longevi e articolati: il gotico e la fantascienza. Il primo, evolutosi attorno ai temi...

Recent developments in the polyhedric field of Digital Humanities offer a desirable perspective for corpus-driven literary studies. This is mainly due to both the implementation of tools for the statistical treatment of textual data, as well as the rapid expansion of the Internet in terms of online availability of archives and collections. Notwithstanding a series of contributions highlighting the mutual benefits derived from the combination of computational methods and literary scholarship, traditional criticism seems to ignore the epistemological continuum between qualitative and quantitative approaches to literature, treating them as two separate impermeable realities. In this article I will attempt to reconcile these approaches by presenting an exercise in computational criticism about the linguistic and ideological constructions at the basis of the rising genre of Augustan England: the novel. The aim is to examine the keywords at the core of the extensively theorised modern par...