Books
Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Moralizing in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), Honorable Mention for 2018 Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association (here). Reviewed in Review of English Studies by Natalie Houston (here), in Nineneenth-Century Literature by Matthew Sussman (here), and in Victorian Studies by Danny Wright (here). It was also featured on the V21 Collective Book Forum (here) and discussed by Nan Z. Da in her "Critical Response III" essay in Critical Inquiry (here). It was mentioned in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" essay by Antonia Hitchens (here).
Reductive Reading takes up critical methods that call attention to how they subordinate, or reduce, textual complexity. The book uses a reductive lens to argue that the moral force of Victorian fiction lies not only in the examples of conduct offered by its characters or the wise words delivered by its narrators, but in the structures of judgment encoded in its syntax. The first chapter reads censorious mid-nineteenth-century book reviews, which paid careful attention to form because textual detail in the period was understood to be saturated with moral as well as aesthetic significance. Three case studies follow: In the George Eliot's essays and novels, clauses that modify major nouns create space for critical reflection; in the sketches and novels of Charles Dickens, speech-tags that describe a character’s manner of speaking invest even the shortest speech with dramatic irony; in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-epic, present-tense digressions disrupt the developmental narrative of the plot to exercise provisional judgment in the middle of unfolding events.
Essays:
* "Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School." Avidly, Sept 10, 2020. On reading Mansfield Park in 2020.
* "Death Poetry During a Pandemic" The Rambling, Oct 25, 2020. On the intersection of teaching and grief, and also Tennyson,
* "Authorship After AI." Digital Humanities Section. Public Books, June 26, 2019. On authorship attribution and its limits.
* “Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad.” Public Books, April 20, 2018. Review ofThe Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Bessel van der Kolk and a few Harry Potter books.
* “Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords, 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 745–49. My contribution to the Special Issue on Keywords.
* “Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Genre 50.1 (2017). On reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë against Jane Eyre : An Autobiography (1848), in special issue on “Narrative Against Data” edited by Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal .
* "Other People's Data: Humanities Edition," Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2016). This essay argues that that we need to make better use of the excess data produced by projects that use numbers to make sense of literature.
* "Better Questions, Better Answers: Frontloading Concepts in Full-Text Search," on Teaching Tools: Digital Humanities and the Novel, affiliate website of Studies in the Novel (August 2015).
* “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax,” in ELH 81.4 (2014).
* “Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter” (Spring 2014) and “Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen” (Winter 2013), New Orleans Review. Experiments in the form of the nineteenth-century review: long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
* "Flying without Children," in Airplane Reading (Zero Books, 2016)
Works in Progress:
Portraits of the Author with Pen in Hand: Transatlantic Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century takes up cultural obsessions with the relation between author and text, focusing on nineteenth-century books about celebrity authors. Surveying a miscellaneous sea of texts just adjacent to the novels, poetry, and life-writings we know best, Allison draws on interlocking computational approaches to genre: book history, digital archives, and algorithmic criticism.
Escape Reading: Wherever You Go, There You Are is a collection of essays that makes a case for the restorative properties of genres like comedy, kids fantasy, and time travel movies as ways of helping us process the past, in the present.
The Name on the Cover uses computational analysis to illuminate the many ways texts get co-created—rewritten, edited, and packaged—on their way to publication.
Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Moralizing in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), Honorable Mention for 2018 Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association (here). Reviewed in Review of English Studies by Natalie Houston (here), in Nineneenth-Century Literature by Matthew Sussman (here), and in Victorian Studies by Danny Wright (here). It was also featured on the V21 Collective Book Forum (here) and discussed by Nan Z. Da in her "Critical Response III" essay in Critical Inquiry (here). It was mentioned in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" essay by Antonia Hitchens (here).
Reductive Reading takes up critical methods that call attention to how they subordinate, or reduce, textual complexity. The book uses a reductive lens to argue that the moral force of Victorian fiction lies not only in the examples of conduct offered by its characters or the wise words delivered by its narrators, but in the structures of judgment encoded in its syntax. The first chapter reads censorious mid-nineteenth-century book reviews, which paid careful attention to form because textual detail in the period was understood to be saturated with moral as well as aesthetic significance. Three case studies follow: In the George Eliot's essays and novels, clauses that modify major nouns create space for critical reflection; in the sketches and novels of Charles Dickens, speech-tags that describe a character’s manner of speaking invest even the shortest speech with dramatic irony; in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-epic, present-tense digressions disrupt the developmental narrative of the plot to exercise provisional judgment in the middle of unfolding events.
Essays:
* "Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School." Avidly, Sept 10, 2020. On reading Mansfield Park in 2020.
* "Death Poetry During a Pandemic" The Rambling, Oct 25, 2020. On the intersection of teaching and grief, and also Tennyson,
* "Authorship After AI." Digital Humanities Section. Public Books, June 26, 2019. On authorship attribution and its limits.
* “Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad.” Public Books, April 20, 2018. Review ofThe Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Bessel van der Kolk and a few Harry Potter books.
* “Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords, 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 745–49. My contribution to the Special Issue on Keywords.
* “Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Genre 50.1 (2017). On reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë against Jane Eyre : An Autobiography (1848), in special issue on “Narrative Against Data” edited by Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal .
* "Other People's Data: Humanities Edition," Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2016). This essay argues that that we need to make better use of the excess data produced by projects that use numbers to make sense of literature.
* "Better Questions, Better Answers: Frontloading Concepts in Full-Text Search," on Teaching Tools: Digital Humanities and the Novel, affiliate website of Studies in the Novel (August 2015).
* “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax,” in ELH 81.4 (2014).
* “Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter” (Spring 2014) and “Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen” (Winter 2013), New Orleans Review. Experiments in the form of the nineteenth-century review: long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
* "Flying without Children," in Airplane Reading (Zero Books, 2016)
Works in Progress:
Portraits of the Author with Pen in Hand: Transatlantic Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century takes up cultural obsessions with the relation between author and text, focusing on nineteenth-century books about celebrity authors. Surveying a miscellaneous sea of texts just adjacent to the novels, poetry, and life-writings we know best, Allison draws on interlocking computational approaches to genre: book history, digital archives, and algorithmic criticism.
Escape Reading: Wherever You Go, There You Are is a collection of essays that makes a case for the restorative properties of genres like comedy, kids fantasy, and time travel movies as ways of helping us process the past, in the present.
The Name on the Cover uses computational analysis to illuminate the many ways texts get co-created—rewritten, edited, and packaged—on their way to publication.
