Abstract
In my study, I undertake a significant data-based analysis of the history of the Hungarian literature. The corpus contains one hundred Hungarian novels from 1832 to 2005 in which I mostly examine the average sentence length of each texts. Visualizing the results along the years of their publication, clear tendencies emerge, which could open new perspectives on the history of the Hungarian novel. My paper describes the process of the composition of the corpus, the codes which produced the graphs in the R Studio programming language environment, as well as the interpretation of the graphs. What could lie be behind the declining trends of the 19th century (what is the connection between the history of the education, the history of the press and the length of the sentences), how much this can be seen as a national specificity, and how can we describe the “long-sentence poetics” of the late 20. century (eg. Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, Imre Kertész)? These main questions are explored in this macroanalysis.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Average Sentence Lenght, History of the Hungarian Literature
