Abstract
This study analyzes Virginia Woolf’s 1915 novel The Voyage Out by adopting a corpus-based stylistic methodology. Woolf scholars have not reached a consensus on how to distinguish the novel in terms of literary genre an adventure or a female domestic novel tradition, and recently this text has increasingly been defined as a failed bildungsroman due to its slow narrative development and the tragic plot in which the female protagonist dies without achieving self-fulfillment. This study intends to investigate whether a quantitative methodology can supplement the current scholarly discussion of Woolf’s novel and see if this new methodology can help analyze lengthy modern texts more efficiently and objectively. First, using Stylo software through R, I will map out the genre of The Voyage Out among a large number of 18-19th century literary texts. After testing the legitimacy of corpus-based genre classification through a detailed reading of the novel’s lexical patterns sampled through AntConc tool, this study continues to explore the stylistic characteristics of this transitional modernist text as an incomplete coming-of-age novel.
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