Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States and the United Kingdom, rivers and streams were piped, dammed, reversed, straightened, and dried-up, all in service of a growing demand for clean, reliable water in every household. This paper uses an interpretive distant reading methodology for asking how this dramatic change was reflected in English-language literature. As an imaginative space of reflection on culture and material life, how does literature accommodate and make sense of changes in environmental realities? Looking at the diachronic word embeddings surrounding the word “river” in the Novel TM corpus housed within HathiTrust Digital Library, this study identifies a number of trends over time in the shifting semantic fields surrounding “river.” It argues that these results indicate a possibly less intimate conceptualization of rivers over time, one more defined by rivers’ geographic attributes than by their ecologies and specific natures. (DM)