American Fiction—Exploring the American Experience Through Literature

How do American novels inform American history? How do the creative works of American writers help us explore the varieties of the American experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How do the classics of American fiction framed within the larger context of American publishing help present a truer picture of American social and cultural attitudes? And how does an exploration of Gale’s American Fiction, 1774-1920, in the context of Gale’s massive archives - and how does an exploration of Gale’s American Fiction, 1774-1920, in the context of broader archival content across the 18th and 19th centuries offer practitioners of the digital humanities countless opportunities for research? This webinar will demonstrate how even a simple search, for a string of words — “may be used against” — is much more useful in American Fiction than in Google Books. The exploration of trends, themes, topics, contexts — across multiple sources – requires state-of-the-art functionality.