Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Using Chawton House Library's "Novels Online," several corpora have been set up for a computer-aided textual analysis of the use of vocabulary by women writing "domestic novels" from 1752 to 1834. This corpus stylistics approach makes it possible to map texts according to their word usage and to identify quantitative keywords which provide vocabulary profiles through comparison and contrast with contemporary male and female canonical texts. Items identified include pronouns, markers of dialogue and of intensity; others can be grouped into specific lexical fields such as feelings. One text from the collection then forms the object of a case-study to explore a paradox: although Jane Taylor's use of vocabulary in her 1817 Rachel appears the most representative of the corpus made up of 42 novels by women, this Chawton text has been called "a highly original tale." Methodology and findings are both presented to address the challenge of identifying features which constitute typicality.
Keywords
Chawton novels online, Women's writing 1751-1834, Computer-aided textual analysis, Corpus stylistics, quantitative stylistics, Jane Taylor
Chawton "Novels Online," Women's Writing 1751-1834 and Computer-aided Textual Analysis
1.Chawton Novels Online and Strategies of Writing
1.1The scope of the study
Chawton House Library's Novels Online offers some sixty non-canonical texts of fiction in electronic form, which can be converted from PDF into machine-readable text necessary for use with software, rather than as facsimiles provided by databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). These electronic texts all derive from the rarest books the library owns and, with two exceptions, range from 1760 to 1830.1 Most of them are novels centered on a heroine or a small community, set in the British Isles, akin to those of Jane Austen, Chawton's star (her house in the village is a museum and Chawton House, formerly in the possession of the Knight family, is now a library and study center focusing "on works written by women in English during the period 1600 to 1830" (Chawton House Library)). Because the Chawton Novels Online have been carefully typed and checked by volunteers, their quality is high, contrary to many freely accessible electronic texts (Bandry-Scubbi, "Chawton House"). From the fifty-four which were available when this study began with a visiting fellowship at Chawton House Library in April 2013, thirty-four have...
