Charlie Gleek, “‘In This Way the Moons and the Seasons Passed’: Distantly Reading the Literary Criticism of Things Fall Apart,” Humanities Commons (2017): http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6KD3P.

I employ distant reading techniques and data visualization tools to assess the literary criticism of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. My findings suggest that the scholarly literary criticism of Things Fall Apart does not occur independently with the publication of Achebe’s work in 1958, but is a part of a larger trend in literary criticism and theory associated with the establishment of postcolonial studies. Moreover, distantly reading the literary criticism of Things Fall Apart points towards the ways in which critics have narrowly focused on framing Achebe’s text as a work of African culture and colonialism, in comparison with other texts in the genre. Such analysis has implications not only for locating Achebe’s text within a narrow literary genre but also for how literary scholars can apply quantitative literary analysis to literary criticism in order to make inferences about the production of literary theory and culture.