Networks and Transnational Communities of Letters: How Can Literary Studies Reclaim the ‘Network Turn’?

LITERARY STUDIES have increasingly been encouraged to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and engage with what has been termed the 'Network Turn' in the humanities.This approach, while it encourages scholars to benefit from -and contribute to -the 'visual and quantitative analysis of networks to shed light on the study of culture', also acknowledges the value of 'critical skills native to humanistic inquiry' in the 'theorisation and critique of our networked world'. 1 Such advocacy is found in key scholarly volumes, such as The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (2021), 2 which has argued for the value of adopting network-based methodologies and frameworks -typical of fields like computer science -to expand and enhance the scope and reach of humanities research, beyond disciplinary boundaries.Within the ever-evolving domain of the Digital Humanities, network analysis has indeed often been used to uncover and visualize hidden connections, sometimes revealing unpredictable patterns, and to tease out and highlight important socio-cultural nodes emerging from complex webs of intersecting links.In particular, in the past twenty years, the use of Digital Humanities tools has been increasingly applied to Literary Studies to map out cultural networks.For instance, historical-bibliometric datasets have been used to trace the dissemination of ideologies across space and time, 3 while Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been used to map relationships between authors or between authors and cultural agents, extrapolating data from biographical works, epistolary correspondence and paratexts. 4More recently, scholars in the field of the Digital Humanities have highlighted how visualizing networks via computational methods can yield immediate insights from larger corpora, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of research across disciplines and increasing its accessibility to a much larger public. 5s this growing body of scholarship demonstrates, this network approach is undeniably providing literary specialists with new tools to explore, systematize and disseminate hidden complexities, often in a transdisciplinary fashion, across texts,