Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

What makes an author unique? How does authorship suggest a style, a form unique to a particular writer’s consciousness? Can we measure such variations in style? Literary studies have tried to parse questions such as these through focused close readings of individual texts. Such efforts have led to periodization in which literary epochs are disambiguated based on literary style. Focusing on the shift from the 19th to 20th century, Matthew Hannah graphs semantic shifts in literary language applying distant reading methods. Analyzing a corpus of some one hundred canonical British novels, Hannah charts divergences in language used between the two periods by applying statistical program R to dissect and classify texts into categories based on word quantities proximal to other clusters of frequently used words. This process of quantifying and clustering produces outputs demonstrating how modern literature departed—or didn’t—from nineteenth-century writing and provides clear stylistic groupings of similarly written novels, producing a taxonomy of literary texts that is often surprising and illuminating. Using this analysis as a starting point, Hannah then questions the attribution of style to authorship and interrogates the notion of periodization as a metric for literary study.