Alan Liu's first book, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford UP, 1989), explored the relation between the imaginative experiences of literature and history. Theoretical essays in the 1990s then explored cultural criticism, the “new historicism,” and postmodernism in contemporary literary studies. In 1994, when he started his Voice of the Shuttle Web site for humanities research, he began to study information culture as a way to close the circuit between the literary or historical imagination and the technological imagination.