Women’s Writing at the Chicago World’s Fair (1893): CORRECT START TIME IS 4 PM, THURS, 11/7, HOLLANDER 241

Guest speaker, Professor Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, will hold a lecture on Women’s writing at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair as a counter history of German national literature, a research that she approaches using digital humanities tools.

The collection of 300 books by German women displayed in the Woman’s Building of the 1893 Chicago World Fair offers the possibility of crafting an account of “national” literature in the European Age of Nationalism that contrasts with the many national literary histories that in the 1890s proudly lined the bookshelves of middle-class homes. In the official story, written exclusively by men, German national literature comprised works by the best male authors writing in a limited number of genres, though no criteria for best were ever enumerated for these histories. The standard account proceeds chronologically sometimes concluding before 1870.

The woman’s collection, selected for the fair by an all-women committee, offers, by contrast, a slice of women’s writing in many genres over about four decades with a focus on recent publication. It thus facilitates an approach to evaluating women’s writing as a national product, one that conceives of it as taking place in an evolving dynamic literary field with multiple forces at play, as books for the “reading nation.” How then can one read 300 books?

This talk will present preliminary results from three approaches to mining and evaluating a collection that in 1893 was asserted by German women as national in an international context: 1) fiction and non-fiction writing modeling how to be a German woman, 2) women’s detective fiction as literature for the “reading nation,” and 3) a “distant reading” of 40 novels using digital humanities tools.

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