Reading the past with tools of the future: a digital analysis of critical texts from the early nineteenth century

Abstract This article examines a set of critical texts produced in the United Kingdom, France and Portugal between 1797 and 1821 in order to understand how men of letters reacted to novels in the early nineteenth century and what criteria they used in their analyses. It inquires whether the language in which the texts were written and its purpose interfered in thinking about fiction. The study uses a digital annotation tool, DLNotes2, which allows comparisons between large amounts of data with an accuracy that a regular reading would not allow. The analysis revealed the existence of a transnational literate community, which thought about the novels in a very similar way.