Towards a computational history of modernism in European literary history

Autor(en)

Tamara Radak, Pieter Francois, Lou Burnard, Agnes Hilger, Fotis Jannidis, Gabor Palkó, Roxana Patras, Michael Preminger, Diana Santos

Abstrakt

In this paper, we investigate the common narrative in literary history that the inner lives of characters became a central preoccupation of literary modernism. We operationalise this notion via a proxy, tracing the use of verbs relating to inner life across 10 language corpora from the ELTeC collection, which comprises novels from the period between 1840–1920. We expected to find an increase in the use of inner-life verbs corresponding to the traditional periodisation of modernism in each of the languages. However, different experiments conducted with the data do not confirm this hypothesis. We therefore look at the results in a number of more granular ways, but we cannot identify any common trends even when we split the verbs into individual categories, or take canonicity or gender into account. We discuss the obtained results in detail, proposing potential reasons for them and including potential avenues of further research as well as lessons learned.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Journal

Open Research Europe

Band

3

Anzahl der Seiten

17

ISSN

2732-5121

DOI

https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16290.1

Publikationsdatum

2022

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

602053 Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 605007 Digital Humanities

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

General

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/9974d7ed-3bba-4460-96a4-4a8d175c06e0