EMPIRICAL LITERARY RESEARCH ON WOMEN AND READERS

Both traditional and computerized scholars face problems when they attempt empirical research on women writers and women readers using currently available computational tools. This essay discusses some factors that have inhibited empirical research; it develops its examples from work in progress on 18th century English poetry and on reader responses. A number of large linguistic and text databases are almost useless for research on women writers because works by women are either not included or represented by easily accessible, rather than editorially clean, texts. Traditional and contemporary reader response studies are also insufficiently empirical for reasons of sexual bias or flaws in research design.