Publisher's Synopsis
Is it possible for a computer program to identify literary genres as well as human reasoning, to completely sequence a set of novels in order to trace the peculiarity of the stylistic phenomenon? The research of Franco Moretti and his team, the Stanford Literary Lab founded in 2010, has confirmed it: we can use computational systems to analyze in detail the genres of the novel, look for patterns in the arrangement of the most frequent words and scrutinize the interconnected layers of meaning. But undoubtedly one of the most important novelties to emerge from the digitization of literary studies is the ability to map the vast and unexplored continent of literature (The Great Unread): «We used to work with a couple of hundred nineteenth-century novels, but now we can analyze thousands or tens of thousands and soon hundreds of thousands; it is as if, suddenly, we have a telescope with which we can observe unknown galaxies». In this exploratory journey into the «narrative genome», Literature in the Laboratory succeeds in spreading the passion of a rigorous research process that, not without its difficulties, opens revolutionary doors for literary studies.
