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Malamud at Oregon State: A Digital Humanities Project Main Menu Bernard Malamud Letter Network A New Life: Reception History A New Life: Political Context A New Life: Textual Investigations

A New Life: Reception Timeline

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Explanation of Timeline

The Reception History Timeline offers alternative ways to explore reviews of Bernard Malamud’s A New Life, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1961. The reviews are organized by the date of publication.

You can scroll through the timeline to explore reviews of A New Life in the order that they were published. Or, click on individual links within the timeline to view images of the reviews in print and the specific sections that refer to the novel’s location. The zoom in/out buttons to the left of the timeline are useful for looking more closely at clusters of reviews.

We recommend looking for trends within and across the publication date clusters. Below are a few questions to get you started:

What kinds of publications (local, national, international) published reviews of the novel first, or appear at the beginning of clusters?
When and where were the outliers published?
Are there content trends, such as language reviews used to describe place, characters and plot?

Limitations

We have not been able to confirm the exact date of original publication for A New Life. This information would certainly help to orient the clusters of reviews we visualize in the timeline. Included in this timeline are the reviews that listed specific dates (with Month, Day and Year). Because so many reviews were published within days of each other, we did not include reviews in the timeline with unknown dates, or with estimated dates such as Winter 1961.

At the moment, our timeline doesn’t have the capability to color-code the most specific setting mentioned in the review the way that our Reception History Map does. While we would have liked to have visualized the locations mentioned in a clearer way, we hope that the selected passages nevertheless offer users a preview of the reviews.

You can read the review in its entirety by locating it in the “Contents” section below.

Looking Forward

The A New Life Reception Timeline is public and open to users who want to expand on it, by potentially adding more reviews. Since we hope people will add on to this project, we have made our data public on this spreadsheet, and we encourage people to use the data and add to it. You may also view all of our process documents in our Google Drive folder.

Explanation of Timeline

Limitations

Looking Forward

Contents of this path: