snazzerdoo.files.wordpress.com€¦ · web view, the central conceit is of a ghost who is...

Frank Cernik 1Grabbable Ghost, Palpable Prizrak

Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United StatesIn 1842, a St Petersburg police officer seized the collar of one Akakii Akakievich

Bashmachkin, who was engaged in the theft of a musician's winter coat. After calling two other

officers to aid in the arrest, the initiating officer decided to take some snuff tobacco. The coat

thief must have had a sensitive nose, though - he sneezed before the officer could insufflate, and,

while the three officers wiped their eyes clear of his snot, Akakii vanished.

What strikes me most curious about this incident is not that Mr. Bashmachkin escaped

three trained men with a well-timed sneeze, but rather that they managed to lay hands on him at

all: Akakii Akakievich was dead, buried at least three days prior to his arrest, and the coat-

stealing was the act of his ghost. That anyone could catch him by the collar at all, let alone

surprise him, came as something of a shock to me. With his inclusion of a ghost you can grab,

Nikolai Gogol, from whose story The Overcoat this episode is drawn, suggests an understanding

of spectrality totally different from my own. The ghosts I grew up with were featured in The

Muppet Christmas Carol and The Devil's Backbone - at their most material, they were psychic

vapors that other characters would walk through, and while on occasion one would hold your

hand like in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, it would be unthinkable to initiate

contact with a ghost, yourself. Not so in The Overcoat.

Prior to my re-reading of The Overcoat, I had understood ghosts as idealized entities

who represent the power of emotionality unmediated by the limits of corporeality. The first

illustration to come to mind is in the video game Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, based

on the gaming company White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade franchise.1 Early in the plot,

the player character needs to go find a locket in a haunted hotel. It soon becomes clear that the

ghost is leading you through a specific path as a means of revisiting its memories. As it does so,

1 White Wolf and Troika Games, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, PC (Activision, 2004).


Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United Statesit becomes increasingly emotional, resulting in an escalatingly psychedelic and phantasmal hotel

landscape. At one point prior to the climax, the ghost begins to trash a kitchen by throwing pots,

pans, and cutlery across the room, sometimes multiple items at once from opposite corners. It

also was and continues to be my belief that conceptions of ghostliness runs meaningfully parallel

to conceptions of humanity: the two defining characteristics of a ghost are that it is dead and that

it is still a person, and so the most easily accessed understanding of ‘ghost’ will always be ‘the

things important enough about a person to continue after death.’

Part of my joint definition can continue in light of The Overcoat - after all, Akakii is

enraged as he goes about stealing coats from St. Petersburg's residents - but his ghostliness is

distinctly corporeal. Likewise, in Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, the central conceit is of a ghost

who is effectively frightened out of his house because of a relentless series of practical jokes. At

one point he “[adopts] the Fourth dimension of Space as a means of escape” from the Otis twins,

who are the perpetrators of these pranks and who harry him at every turn with slicked staircases,

buckets of water atop doors left ajar, and pea-shooters.2 Even in America, where ghosts are

remarkably bodiless, one finds Edward Mitchell’s Back from that Bourne, a story in which a

ghost three years dead returns through a séance, refuses to go back, and returns to his previous

employment as a fisherman. With ghosts' unembodiedness thus in question, I believe it to be

worth further investigating other aspects of phantomhood, especially in regard to how the light

cast by ghosts may reflect onto people.

The investigation I put forth to you now is thus motivated by two centers. The first of

these is a question: What are ghosts like? Put otherwise, what characteristics do we ascribe to

them? Over the course of my research, I have added three corollary questions to acknowledge

2 Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost (Boston and London: John W. Luce and Company, 1887), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14522.


Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United Statesthat no ghost exists in a vacuum: What kinds of stories feature ghosts, why do authors choose to

include a ghost in their story, and, once the ghost is there, what do their authors use them to say?

These are very macro-oriented questions, and the type of response I hope to give is of a trend or

underlying ruleset rather than a hard-and-fast definition. Such being the case, I do not think that

my answer can come from a single emblematic work, or even a small number of such stories set

against each other.

My second center, Gogol's The Overcoat, is more a spiritual one and one which I hope

to have displaced but must still acknowledge: as a point of departure, I have organized much of

my investigation subsequent to the precedent that it established. As above mentioned, this story

suggests a different frame of reference for the ghostly than the one I currently inhabit.

Understanding the context that produced my questions was one way to pursue and make

meaningful their answers, so I decided to set The Overcoat against other 19th century ghost

stories in Russia, and then further to set the Russian tales against their contemporaries in the

United States and Britain, as these are the three countries whose literatures are most accessible to

me. To this effect, I have brought together three centralized and thus supremely useful

collections of ghost stories: Marilyn Minto's Russian Tales of the Fantastic,3 as well as Dorothy

Scarborough's Humorous Ghost Stories4 and Famous Modern Ghost Stories.5 I have chosen to

exclude all non-19th century stories from their collections, as well as stories that were not written

in England, Russia, or the United States. To this abbreviated list, I also added three stories that I

consider to be important works in the "ghost story" genre: Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat,6

3 Minto, Marilyn, ed. Russian Tales of the Fantastic. Bristol Classical Press, 1994.4 Scarborough, Dorothy, ed. Humorous Ghost Stories. GP Putnam's Sons, 1921.5 Scarborough, Dorothy, ed. Famous Modern Ghost Stories. GP Putnam's Sons, 1921.6 Gogol, Nikolai. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1998.


Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United StatesAleksandr Pushkin's The Queen of Spades,7 and Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy

Hollow.8 Each of these three is widely considered by European and American literary scholars to

be a classic in establishing the form of its respective country’s prose generally. Each also, within

my experience as a reader, provides compelling visions for how a ghost may take shape. For a

complete list of the 22 included works, please see the accompanying spreadsheet.

I began by trying to find only stories that fit with my contemporary understanding of

what a ghost is or can be, but quickly noted that my qualifications for what does or does not

'count,' would immediately disqualify The Overcoat. After this came the realization that

restricting the stories to what I readily recognize as 'ghostly' would only serve to reinforce my

then-present impressions, which was in direct opposition to the goal of this project as it was

conceived. In the study you see before you, I have followed the lead of the stories'

contemporaries in deciding what is or is not a ghost or a ghost story - aided in no small part by

the editors’ explicit description of their books as collections of ghost stories - and thus the data

that I have collected includes some from stories whose ghostliness is not recognizable as such

today. In defense of this choice, it is worth keeping in mind that both Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre came out of Lord Byron's challenge to write a

ghost story, and that there is little reason to believe that their contemporaries would accuse them

of having failed this ghastly charge. That these stories and others are not currently included in

my data has more to do with time constraints than anything else.

Questions and locations thus defined, it is my hope that Franco Moretti's techniques of

distant reading will be of use here to draw from the ghost a constellation of variable

characteristics which may result in observable trends. According to Moretti’s analytic, each

7 Chandler, Robert, ed. Russian short stories from Pushkin to Buida. Penguin UK, 2005.8 Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Project Gutenberg, 2012.


Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United Statesindividual work of literature, when closely read, is distinct to the point of anomaly. However,

from a distance, certain trends emerge, such as genre and understandings of the nature of space,

which Moretti describes as 'larger' than novels, and form, which is 'smaller.' Each respectively

and in combination comprise the parts from which literary works are assembled. Moretti's

contribution is to give these trends both quantitative and qualitative visualization, to graph

number and draw ideas.9 The number of works published per year can be graphed and broken

down by genre, at the macro level, and its treatment of space can be mapped, but at the micro

level a work's formal divergences can be diagrammed, and its characters arranged into a network,

and each of these visualizations can be compared to and combined with visualizations from other

pieces. These visualizations, of course, do not say anything by themselves. They are just math

and geometry, more or less, and require interpretation to have any power, but, as a new kind of

evidence, they allow for new styles and kinds of arguments.10

Moretti’s visualizations need not be constricted to the uses he first puts them to (e.g.,

graphing genre’s popularity by works published per year, and others as described above).

Graphs, maps, diagrams, and networks are each wide in application, and can be combined and

reconfigured in productive ways for understanding literary concepts. The configuration that I

have pursued in my research is to create a network of form, subject matter, and characterization

choices, so that these may be seen as an inclusive whole as they connect with each other and

interact both within a given work and in a network of other pieces.

To collect the data for these networks, I read each story a single time, and recorded any

elements of that story that I thought might be important to my project. This could be anything

from whether the ghost was corporeal, to whether gluttony was important in understanding a

9 Moretti, Franco. Graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for a literary history. Verso, 2005.10 Moretti, Franco. Distant reading. Verso Books, 2013.


Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United Statescharacter's motivation, to the story's treatment of gender, to the importance of employment and

bureaucracy to the world in which the ghost manifested. I also took a few cues from Scarborough

and Minto's introductions to their respective books for some thematic elements to include. After

compiling my list of potential ghost-story elements, I re-read each of the stories to check for each

of the element variables I had noted, and recorded the results in an Excel spreadsheet. In The

Legend of Sleepy Hollow, for one example, the character Ichabod Crane is well noted for his

appetite, even by the other characters. For another, a full eight of my stories could replace at least

one female character with an especially sexy and attractive table lamp without meaningfully

affecting the plot, and another three used a woman’s death exclusively in terms of how it

affected a male character. The importance of bureaucracy is particularly marked in Frank

Stockton’s The Transferred Ghost, whose plot is resolved by the particularly strange deus-ex-

machina of the central spirit successfully getting through the paperwork to become someone

else’s ghost.

Along the way, some of my variables expanded. For example, in many ghost stories,

there is not a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer to whether a ghost has a body; rather, they behave at

specific times and in specific ways that are physical and at other times and in other ways that are

incorporeal. In Twain’s A Ghost Story, for example, the titular ghost walks through a door

without opening it during one part of the story, but pulls the sheets from the narrator’s bed, and

convinces him that this is not all a dream by the simple and quite unintentional act of leaving

footprints in the dust. In other stories, there simply isn't enough information about the ways that

the ghosts interact with the material world around them to make a conclusive judgment about the

ghost's corporeality. The ghost in Nikolai Leskov’s The White Eagle is only rarely described


Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United Statesphysically at all - most of the time, he’s just sort of there, and most of his ghostly activity is

centered on talking to the narrator, Galaktion, and making him nervous and depressed.

Additionally, some variables had to register multiple answers - the titular characters of

Brander Matthews' The Rival Ghosts did not trend toward the same moral alignment. One was

generally benevolent, the other generally malevolent, and at the end of the story they each

changed to the ghost-equivalent of a 'regular person,' which is to say that, after a particular and

rather sudden point in the story, they no longer bent exclusively toward either help or harm but

instead became bound by the same ostensibly-neutral cultures of behaviour that the non-ghost

characters of the story heeded: breaking pattern from protecting the protagonist from making bad

decisions and scaring away his houseguests, respectively, they had a conversation with him and

he convinced them to get married.

Other variables I reduced or eliminated altogether. In addition to gender, I was paying

attention to representations of race in these stories. Every character of color I encountered was

both overtly essentialized and depicted as a servant, for example, so those two descriptions were

not meaningfully distinct as variables in my data set and were collapsed into a single qualifier;

overt Orientalism, by contrast, did not require the presence of any characters of color, as in Poe’s

Ligeia, and was absent from some stories including Black slaves, so it was kept separate from

general racial essentialism and servanthood. The depiction of women was less frequently and

more variably essentialized in this set of stories. One element that I expected to find, of a room

or environment that was haunted independently of any personified ghost, was absent from all the

stories I read, and thus did not strike me as worth keeping on my spreadsheet. For the full list of

final variables, see again the following footnote.11

11 Variables include: country, date, dream involvement, source of narrative uncertainty, undefinedness, backstory of ghost, corporeality, ghostly vengeance/punishment/redemption, curse existence, murder, the


Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United StatesMy data thus compiled, I began to search for ways to visualize it, so that I could see the

data in a holistic, rather than linear, environment. I hoped the visualization would provide insight

into ghost story trends that the disparate and linear presentation of the spreadsheet itself was

inherently unequipped to offer. This was where my project began to encounter difficulties: most

visualization software, either browser-based or installable, was simply unable to handle the

complexity of my data in either descriptive "Q: What visual or material traces does the ghost

create throughout the story The Messenger? A: seen through window, trail of blood" or binary

"Q: Does the ghost possess anyone in Ligeia? A: 1" formats. These programs, such as the native

graphing capabilities in Microsoft Excel or the Tableau business visualization software, were

often hard-pressed to create even a bar graph, let alone a complex multi-field comparison

between elements of up to 22 stories. I do not believe there is any way I could have gotten these

to work for me.

My second point of difficulty is my own ability as a programmer and general computer

user. While I am familiar with some of the basics of computer science, such as the need for

totally discrete and specific commands, my programming ability is so restricted as to be

negligible. Two programs, Sigma and Circos, looked like they'd be perfectly able to represent my

data and the relationships between its parts, but required proficiency with Git software and the

Sexy Lamp and Fridge Tests, overt Orientalism, essentialism, ghosts’ remains are important, sleepwalking, possession by ghosts, ghosts’ motility, explicit spiritualism and séances, explicit commentary on society, story centers on ghosts or people, commentary on the ‘ghost story’ genre, interested and disinterested courting, swindling and chance, predestined ghost, restriction of the scope, the ghost’s moral alignment, lower/middle/upper-class characters, setting, ghosts’ mortality, story is intertextual, polyglot characters, death-instituted changes, incomplete narration, triumph/failure of rationality, characters merely glimpse the ghost, frame and skaz narratives, literal after-life, impotence, haunting of person or of place, animated objects, ghost skeptics or believers, the ghost persists or vanishes, story focuses on: religion, memory, addiction and obsession, deadly sins, repetition, clothing, marriage, legalism, the last will and testament, legacy, employment, bureaucracy, secrets, and politics.


Ghosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United StatesPerl programming language, respectively, in order to even open. Lacking this proficiency, these

were dead ends for me.

Finally, there was a select group of visualization programs that seemed able to handle

the requisite complexity: Google's Fusion Tables, IBM's Many Eyes, and Density Design's Raw,

among others. Each of these, however, require either a different type of encoding than I had

access to - an extension only produced by particular specialty programs, for example - or a

totally different format of data storage than the one I had been using. The changes that this would

require struck me as prohibitively intensive to do on my own; unlike Moretti, I do not have the

aid of dozens of graduate students to pursue my projects. When I enlisted the help of two

acquaintances, in the form of an amateur programmer and a professional graphic designer, each

independently agreed that there was just too much data to work with.

The program that I finally was able to work with, Gephi, also required substantial data

re-formatting and special software compatibility, but, thankfully, neither was particularly

extensive once I knew what to do. Unfortunately, I am still learning how to add color and labels

to the nodes and edges of the generated visualizations. Without any visual distinctions and with

154 meaningful points and 819 connections between those points, the network produced by even

22 short stories were so complicated as to preclude meaningful analysis.

That is not to say, however, that a total graph of all connections between ghost stories

and their tropes is without merit. Once this table is collected, it is relatively trivial to filter it for

the elements one wishes to use for comparison. It was only a few minutes’ work to create a new

graph that only compared Russian stories, for example, and from there to create graphs for each

England, the United States, and the periods 1819-1859 and 1873-1897.12 There are other

12 Each of the colorless, label-less networks has been included in Appendix 1 to this essay.

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Grabbable Ghost, Palpable PrizrakGhosts and Form in 19th Century Russia, Britain, and the United States

qualifications that I could have used to divide the pieces, but I believe that period and location

are directly significant starting points to how the ghosts can be mediated by geopolitical cultures

that shift with time. Each of these is also too complex for meaningful analysis, with the possible

exception of the English network, but they also each have different shapes, and thus establish a

visual correlative to the simple-in-hindsight observation that the representation of ghosts is

different across time and across cultures.

When reducing the comparison to a single variable, though, such as a ghost’s

corporeality, the network becomes much simpler to read. If the variables to be compared are

limited, then, the actual utility of the graph increases. Another way to reduce the complexity of

the graph would be to group multiple pieces under a single node, such as location or period, then

weight the connections made from that node by how frequently they occur in the independent

pieces of which the group is comprised. This significantly changes the shape of each graph, but it

is useful if one’s intended scale is exclusively at the macro. What it would accomplish would be

to pull frequent and thus, by inference, important cultural-formal variable outcomes toward the

countries, periods, et c in which they occur, without having to go back and pick out ‘This formal

choice is represented in these pieces, and most of them belong to this group.’

There are ways to increase the utility of the network visualization without reducing its

complexity, however. One in particular would, I believe, rather instantly provide the kind of

holistic comparison that I am looking for from this kind of network: a ranked list of second-

degree-of-separation nodes. If a story contains one particular formal choice, such as ‘The

narrator consciously and explicitly withheld information from the reader,’ what other formal

choices might it contain? How frequently does it contain them across a set of stories? Are there

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any seemingly-unrelated formal choices that never occur together? These kinds of experiments

with network data, I believe, have great potential to uncover both the means to answer what

ghosts are like - any co-occurring or mutually-exclusive nodes are more likely to be prompts for

further research than anything else - and possibly even actual answers, once enough data is

collected and the questions sufficiently defined.

While my expansion into the network analysis’ possibility space has not yet borne the

kind of fruit I wanted it to, my research has not been barren of results. Inspection of my

spreadsheet has yielded 15 trends that distinguish 19th century Russian ghost stories from their

U.S. counterparts, and another 6 trends that distinguish between all post-1870 ghost stories and

their pre-1860 predecessors, all included in Appendix 2 at the end of this paper.

I have four comments on these trends. Firstly, Russian stories are more heavily weighted

toward the beginning of the 19th century, and U.S. stories toward the end of it. Because Russia

then skews the early 19th century toward its cultural trends and the United States skews the latter

years toward its own trends, I have only included in the table of chronological trends either those

not meaningfully present in the cultural distinctions, or which reversed those distinctions.

Second, none of the 22 stories I read were written in the 1860s. I suspect that part of this

may be due to the intense turmoil in both Russia and the United States: both countries extended

legal freedom to their servant classes during this time, and it may be that the resulting social

tensions and reorganizations did not give canon-writers any space for phantasmagoric thought. It

may also be that the collections from which the bulk of my stories were drawn did not wish to

include any stories that directly addressed the freedom of the slaves and of the serfs. Those

tensions and reorganizations may also go some way in explaining the differences between early-

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and late-century representations of death and death-focused stories, especially in a United States

fresh from the Civil War.

Conversely, the greatest concentrations of ghost stories included in this survey came out

of the 1840s and the 1880s. The 1880s witnessed a revival of spiritualism, as reflected in the

premises of many ghost stories written in that period. One of the expressions of this spiritualism

was a rise in the use of the séance as a mode of entertainment for the upper classes of both

Russia and America, so it is not surprising that many of their ghost stories featured séances and

the deliberate summoning of ghosts.

My final comment on the trends I have drawn from my stories is that I do not know why

or even whether they are. The patterns I have laid out here are based on two read-throughs of

each of the 22 stories I have selected, and I do not have any basis for extending them to other

ghost stories of their time; there is, quite simply, a high degree of statistical uncertainty.

Depending on your stance, this uncertainty is either mitigated or aggravated by the dataset’s

focus on the creators of literary canon. Further, each of these trends and variable values are

presented without context: it will be a separate project to try and determine why any of them are

present in a given work, or why there is or is not a pattern of them across the ghost story genres.

The why and the whether are thus potential points of expansion for this and similar

projects. Others include investigations into the cultural capital afforded ghost stories within

countries and across time - I find it curious that 8 of the 10 Russian stories were written by such

prominent figures as Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Turgenev, while

only 4 of the 10 U.S. stories find easy name recognition for their writers (Irving, Poe, and

Twain). Additionally, of the 19 writers whose works are present in my survey, no female work is

Frank Cernik13


here represented. My survey is thus only representative of a small subset of the populations of

these countries. It could also benefit from a more robust British presence, as well as an expansion

into ghost story traditions from additional cultures around the world, and the different traditions

and media through which those stories are propagated.

Ultimately, I find myself aligning with the concerns originally laid out by Moretti at the

end of Graphs, Maps, Trees. While the ideas here may yet provide a compelling base to

historical ghosts of the world, there is no argument there yet, no establishment of meaning; what

I have here is a starting point.

I think it is an exciting starting point, though. Though there may be more work yet

before I can even say 'proof of concept,' the possibilities I have discussed over the course of this

paper offer a powerful vision of what network analysis can do when paired with an aggregated,

structural approach to literary texts.

I return to part of my original description of why this work was worth doing in the first

place: an understanding of the nature of ghosts helps us to understand the self-conception of

humanity. This belief has not changed; the answer to 'What are ghosts like?' will be parallel to

'what people are like' in some very interesting ways, as culture revises what survives the body.

Less ambitiously, a holistic understanding of ghosts, nuanced as it will necessarily be by time

and space, will contribute to any further studies of the stories in which they appear.

High as my hopes may be, though, I must confront that I have provided none of that

understanding, and have only elaborated on Moretti's pre-existing framework of how it may be

achieved. Disheartening as I may find that, though, I believe it is somewhat appropriate that I've

reached out to grab a ghost, and all that is left in my hands is its overcoat.

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Appendix 1Networks

Ghost Story Network, 1819-1859

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Ghost Story Network - 1873-1897

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Ghost Story Network - Unfiltered

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Ghost Story Network - Physicality

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Ghost Story Network - Russia

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Ghost Story Network - UK

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Ghost Story Network - USA

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Appendix 2Observed Trends

Russia United States

1. Corporeal ghosts2. People-centered stories3. Ghost forms are more uncertain4. Ghosts inflict more curses5. Ghost stories are more likely to

include cheating6. Many named characters are polyglots7. Death changes personality or begins

decay8. Rationality frequently fails9. Stories are told in the ‘skaz’ style of

oral tradition10. People believe in ghosts11. Memory and forgetting are thematized12. Marriage and courting are less

frequently given focus13. More focus on the events themselves14. Employment is emphasized15. Secrets are thematized

1. Spectral ghosts2. Ghost-centered stories3. Ghost forms are more defined4. Ghosts inflict fewer curses5. Ghost stories are more likely to

include fraud6. Few named characters use more than

one language7. Death does not change form or mind8. Rationality frequently triumphs9. Stories are told in literary style10. People do not believe in ghosts11. Stories are presented unambiguously12. Much of the plot revolves around

couplehood13. More focus on the rules surrounding

the events14. Employment is often irrelevant15. Events and motivations are transparent

1819-1859 1873-1897

1. The ghost appears on its own2. Stories are restricted in scope3. Stories are more frequently urban in

setting4. Ghosts are immortal5. Death does not change personality or

bodily integrity6. Emphasis is given to characters’

material legacies

1. Spiritualism and séances are part of the premise

2. Stories imply unnarrated events3. Stories are more frequently rural in

setting4. Ghosts are mortal or conditional5. Death changes you6. Characters’ last wills are not

considered

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Bibliography

White Wolf and Troika Games, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, PC (Activision, 2004).

Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost (Boston and London: John W. Luce and Company, 1887), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14522.

Minto, Marilyn, ed. Russian Tales of the Fantastic. Bristol Classical Press, 1994.

Scarborough, Dorothy, ed. Humorous Ghost Stories. GP Putnam's Sons, 1921.

Scarborough, Dorothy, ed. Famous Modern Ghost Stories. GP Putnam's Sons, 1921.

Gogol, Nikolai. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1998.

Chandler, Robert, ed. Russian short stories from Pushkin to Buida. Penguin UK, 2005.

Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Project Gutenberg, 2012.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for a literary history. Verso, 2005.

Moretti, Franco. Distant reading. Verso Books, 2013.

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