'Data Imaginary' is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the
long nineteenth century. It argues that during romanticism US culture negotiated the outlines
of the literary-what literature is what literary value consists of and what literature can
do-in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper
contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation
was searching for a national literature of its own data and data-driven practices formed an
important foil a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new democratic
literature. Revisiting formative decades of US literary self-perception through the conceptual
lens of data this book rethinks the representative project of transcendentalism the catalog
poetry of Walt Whitman the formal experimentation of abolitionist literature and the
evolution of American (literary) studies.
