Recent years have seen a noticeable shift of emphasis in post-1800 literary scholarship, whereby an existing interest in cultures of knowledge has been supplemented by a new and vigorous interest in cultures of information. This shift can be seen as a movement beyond the influential Foucauldian account of knowledge and disciplinary power as mutually mediating social forces, and towards a new emphasis on the technological and professional practicalities of organization, administration, and communication—the information work—involved in the production of knowledge and power alike. Such informatic operations are Maurice Lee's focus in Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution, in which he develops a persuasive argument, grounded in an extensive analysis of late nineteenth-century fiction and cultural criticism, that “[i]nformational concepts and practices shape not only the internal thematics of literature but also the ways in which we make meanings from texts” (2).

Lee's “information revolution” is still with us. Our own information-saturated societies have developed and extended its technological innovations (mass-circulation print, global communications) and its social transformations (the growth of bureaucracy, near-universal literacy, standardized testing). As Lee notes, “the managing of literature within information systems influenced aesthetics, archival practices, reading habits, and the production of literary knowledge” (4). This is a story not just of conflict between information and literature, but also of productive engagement. Writers, like everyone else, made use of information systems in their daily lives and in their working practices, and they depicted them in their fictions. Readers, meanwhile, relied on information systems—literary canons, library catalogues, anthologies, reference books—to tell them what and how to read.

Readers, indeed, are at the center of Overwhelmed, which focuses on how the experience of interpreting complex literary works was imagined and reconfigured within a textual economy increasingly organized to provide ever larger quantities of clear and unambiguous information. As might be expected, chapter 1, “Reading,” addresses this aspect of the question in greatest detail, showing how Romantic theories of reading addressed the changing status of fictional works in an era of mass print. Surveying readerly responses to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Lee shows how Robinson, poring over his salvaged Bible, provided nineteenth-century readers with a model of unhurried, absorbed reading to set against the accelerating growth of contemporary print cultures. If that model was nostalgic to the point of being entirely imaginary, it nonetheless became an influential and enduring model for literary, as against informational, reading.

In chapter 2, “Searching,” Lee moves on to consider information work in terms of the organization and retrieval of significantly meaningful texts. Here he sets the laborious searches for important documents that structure fictional plots in Hawthorne, Dickens, and Poe alongside new print genres—such as the scholarly journal Notes and Queries and John Bartlett's wildly popular anthology Familiar Quotations—that gained popularity in the latter half of the century. By bringing these very different sorts of projects together, Lee argues for common ground between novels that “imagine literary sensibilities mastering archival searches” and works of miscellaneous literary and antiquarian information which “subordinate excessive literary materials to informational systems” (106). This makes for a neat synthesis, though the reconciliation might have been tested by a wider range of reference to the many other informational forms—almanacs and handbooks, guidebooks and timetables—which, having sprung up at mid-century, served later writers from Bram Stoker to Virginia Woolf as examples of information's dehumanizing effects.

Lee's third chapter, “Counting,” ventures into the area of quantitative literary studies and, eventually, into recent attempts to quantify literature using digital software tools. Beginning with a discussion of children's books, Lee shows how a particularly heated version of the debate over intensive “deserted island” (as against informational) reading played out in respect to nineteenth-century literary pedagogy. From here Lee moves on to an extended analysis of quantification and enumeration in children's fiction and adventure fiction (the categories blur somewhat) from Stevenson's Treasure Island (1882) to Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911) before embarking on a basic quantitative experiment of his own by searching a corpus of nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels for “words associated with quantification” and “words associated with textuality.” Lee explains his hypothesis that “references to quantification and textuality would increase with the rise of information and mass print,” and while it is to his credit that he reports a negative result, it must be said that the experiment as a whole seems unenlightening (143). For one thing, it is unclear why keywords should serve as a reliable indicator of what Lee calls “thematic engagement” with questions of quantification. Indeed, finding Treasure Island surprisingly lacking in quantitative keywords, Lee insists nonetheless that “quantification is crucial to the book, the number of numbers be damned” (147). He is surely right. But this justified assertion of the claims of literary expertise over those of computer-aided quantification rather calls into question the rationale behind the book's excursion into digital humanities in the first place.

The book's final chapter, “Testing,” concerns the efforts of educationalists and examination authorities from the mid-nineteenth century onward to set standards by which literary knowledge might be judged, and the literary responses to those efforts in novels by Charlotte Yonge, Charlotte Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. As Lee writes, this focus on cultures of testing allows us to see “how Victorian writers struggled to determine, not just the market value of aesthetics, but what it means to render literary attainments as information to be measured, ranked, and rewarded” (184). Although some might wish for a little more detail drawn from historical and administrative sources, his argument here has important implications not only for contemporary educationalists considering the merits and drawbacks of standardized testing in humanities subjects, but also for debates about attainment differences in students from marginalized backgrounds, about literary prize culture, and about the broader questions of how we now read, what we read, and why. Such connections between nineteenth-century debates about the status of information, and the legacies of those debates in contemporary literary pedagogy, are made abundantly clear throughout Overwhelmed, which for that reason serves as a useful introduction to the study of modern information cultures and a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship on the subject.