Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

Aphra Behn (1640-1689), prolific and popular playwright, poet, novelist, and translator, has a fascinating and extensive corpus of literature that plays a key role in literary history. The book offers an analysis of all of Behn's literary output. It examines the author's use of words in terms of frequencies and distributions, and stacks the oeuvre in order to read Behn's word usage synchronically. This experimental analysis of Behn's literary corpus aims to provide a statistical overview of Behn's writing and a study of her works according to the logic of the concordance. The analysis demonstrates the interpretive potential of digital corpus work, and it provides a fascinating reading of synchronic patterns in Behn's writing. The book aims to augment the practice of close-reading by facilitating the rapid moves from full corpus to unique subsets, individual texts, and specific passages. It facilitates the connections among works that share verbal structures that would otherwise not register in diachronic reading. Each chapter focuses on one type of writing: poetry, drama, and prose. The chapters begin with an overview of the documents that make up the corpus for the genre (e.g. the 80 published poems attributed to Behn in her lifetime; 18 plays and 12 prose works). A section on statistical commonplaces follows (length of texts, vocabulary density, and most frequent words). Interesting textual examples are explored in more detail for provocative close readings. The statistics then are contextualized with the general language reference corpus for a discussion of keywords. Each chapter features a unique comparative study that illustrates Behn in a specific context. Each chapter analyzes a specific genre and comparative statistical experiments within the genre. The conclusion compares all three genres to provide a study of Aphra Behn's oeuvre as a whole. The discussion is focused through the lens of Behn's most remarkable words. The keywords for her oeuvre as compared to the literary works in the general language reference (fifteen texts) when the proper names and stage directions are removed to provide an index of Behn's characteristic themes and qualities: oh, young, lover, love, marry, charming, heart, gay, soft, goes. Each of these words opens a window on her corpus as a whole. A unique case study of a significant author using new literary methodologies, this book provides an appealing snapshot of Behn's whole career informed by deep knowledge of the Restoration era and developments in digital humanities and cultural analytics.