Counting Wordsworth by the Bay: The Distance of Josephine Miles

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-4-2017

Abstract

This essay situates the pioneering quantitative methodology of the poet-critic Josephine Miles in the early new-critical period, when the reading practices associated with modern literary studies were taking hold of the incipient discipline—often at the expense of romantic poetry. Skeptical of ideals of autonomy and unity, Miles’s descriptive historicism veers between “close criticism” and what we now call distant reading. Her early work on nineteenth-century poetry as well as her archived word-counting notes challenge the New Critics’ obsession with the shape and wholeness of the poem, adding nuance to our sense of the evolving academic hegemony of formalism in the 1940s while also suggesting new ways of understanding the recent digital turn.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

European Romantic Review

First Page

405

Last Page

412

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