ALH Online Review, Series XXX 1121 © The Author 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Maurice S. Lee, Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 296 pp. Reviewed by Thomas Augst, New York University Maurice Lee’s Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution explores the consequences of reading, writing, and caring about texts in the midst of their abundance. As the title suggests, Lee’s study operates under the sign of apprehension, indeed anxiety, about the fate of literary art in a contemporary environment seemingly inundated by data. At a moment when surfing the internet and following social media have become dominant ways of encountering and engaging with text of any kind, those objects, dispositions, values that have sailed under the flag of “literature” seem buffeted by tsunamis of technology-driven disruption. As the “stuff of numbers, facts, classification, computational science, and media technology,” information represents a “superabundance of data and documents'' that “encroaches on aesthetic experience,” and that threatens “to dispel literary pleasures of unity, beauty and immersion” (2-3). What happens to the attention traditionally associated with literature, as it comes to be dominated and distracted by screens and platforms of electronic communication? What happens to qualities of absorption and surrender, the experience of giving oneself over to works of imagination, of entering fictional worlds and inhabiting them for long periods of time, or identifying with fictional characters and responding to their predicaments as if they were one’s own? And what, as Lee’s study also asks, happens to purposes and methods of contemporary literary criticism, given the quantitative methods and computational tools now prevalent in the digital humanities that enable “distant reading” of textual corpora and seem, to some observers, to sacrifice the familiar practices of interpreting a text to the analysis of texts as data? Lee’s study confronts the presentist alarm animating such questions by presenting a wide-ranging, eclectic literary history of the information revolution that unfolded in nineteenth-century Britain and the US. Andrew Piper observed in Dreaming in Books (2009) that "Romanticism is what happens when suddenly . . . there are too many books to read'' (12). Innovations in printing and circulation made possible the maturation of print into a mass medium, producing an avalanche of books and periodicals that was itself a prominent theme of literary fiction and commentary on both sides of the Atlantic. In surveying this work, Overwhelmed pursues a critical examination of the conceptual dualisms and cultural aftermath that followed from Romantic era’s coding of aesthetics as an autonomous realm of experience. It uses the concept of information to redescribe the rationalities and disenchantments of modernity, with its familiar division of reason Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/34/3/1121/6611795 by guest on 20 August 2022