Back to Distant Reading: 
Poetic Form and the Making of European Literature

Dans le cadre de l'École de printemps en humanités numériques ENEXDI 2026

Conférence (en anglais) d'Artjoms Šeļa (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Distant reading began as an ambitious methodology for world literature and systems analysis: a framework now barely visible among the digital humanities research driven by national literary traditions. This talk proposes a way to return to that original vision, approaching European literary history through poetic forms and the transnational networks they establish. Meters carry their histories; they arrive bundled with expectations about genre, prestige, and position within an uneven literary field. Using computational methods and large comparative corpora in multiple languages, the talk traces a major formal shift in 19th-century European poetry that betrays the emergence of a single European literary field, one that grows more homogeneous as more traditions orient themselves toward centers and forms of literary consecration.