Van de Ven takes us into a contested bookish terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and readerly comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of binge reading and serial consumption.Big Books in Times of Big Data examines recent trends of size and scale in the novel in terms of the shift from the bound book to the newer materialities of the digital. Using a wide-ranging international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, Van de Ven takes us into a contested bookish terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and readerly comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of ‘binging’ and serial consumption.

Inge van de Ven is Assistant Professor of Online Culture in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg School of Humanities & Digital Sciences. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Utrecht University, where she also completed postdoctoral research on creativity in education. She was a 2018-’19 Core Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Budapest.

"A superb book [that] explores the aesthetics, the medial affordances, and the cultural economics of monumental literary works in the present. Balancing careful close readings [...] with wide-ranging discussions of big data epistemologies, media change, and evolving forms of literacy, Big Books in Times of Big Data is a perfect blend of comparative media studies and literary analysis."
− Alexander Starre, assistant professor in American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
"The study is very well written and seamlessly integrates readings of complex large-scale literary works with new theory across literary studies, feminism, digital and media studies."
– Henriette Steiner, associate professor at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Copenhagen.
This book explores the aesthetics, medial affordances, and cultural economics of monumental literary works of the present. Using a wide-ranging international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven recuperates multiple strands of bigness that speak to the tenuous position of print literature in the present but also to the robust stature of literary discourse within our age of proliferating digital media. Her study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book—as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, mediality, gender, and power. Van de Ven takes us into a contested bookish terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and readerly comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of binge reading and serial consumption.