The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us

The history of literary study is primarily remembered as a narrative of conflicting ideas. Critical movements clash, then establish a succession: New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, New Historicism. Although scholars have complicated this simple history-of-ideas story in recent decades with an emphasis on social and institutional struggle, generational conflict remains a central framework: instead of struggles among ideas there are struggles among genteel amateurs, professionalized scholars, and so on.1 In emphasizing conflict, these approaches still leave aside important dimensions of the history of scholarship: assumptions that change quietly, without explicit debate; entrenched patterns that survive the visible conflicts; long-term transformations of the terrain caused by social change. To see more of these kinds of history, another approach is needed—a way of discovering and interpreting patterns on a different historical scale. Consider the following odd but intriguing example of a century-long change in the discipline that never became an overt debate: literary scholars now mention numbers only about 60% as often as we did in the early twentieth century. Figure 1 indicates the frequency of number words over