Clustering of Novels Represented as Social Networks

Mariona Coll Ardanuy,Caroline Sporleder

doi:10.33011/lilt.v12i.1379

Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Caroline Sporleder

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.33011/lilt.v12i.1379

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Abstract

Within the field of literary analysis, there are few branches as confusing as that of genre theory. Literary criticism has failed so far to reach a consensus on what makes a genre a genre. In this paper, we examine the degree to which the character structure of a novel is indicative of the genre it belongs to. With the premise that novels are societies in miniature, we build static and dynamic social networks of characters as a strategy to represent the narrative structure of novels in a quantifiable manner. For each of the novels, we compute a vector of literary-motivated features extracted from their network representation. We perform clustering on the vectors and analyze the resulting clusters in terms of genre and authorship.

Highlights

Within the field of literary analysis, few branches are as confusing as that of genre theory
We focus on the study of novelistic subgenres
We focus on the modern novel, a relatively young literary form which began developing almost two millennia after Aristotle wrote his Poetics treatise,2 and is considered the most important literary genre of the modern age

Summary

Introduction

Within the field of literary analysis, few branches are as confusing as that of genre theory. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (ODLT) (Baldick, 2008) describes the literary genre as “a recognizable and established category of written work employing such common conventions as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another kind” This vague definition gives a sense of the difficulty that lies behind the task of categorizing literary works according to their genre. We focus on the modern novel, a relatively young literary form which began developing almost two millennia after Aristotle wrote his Poetics treatise, and is considered the most important literary genre of the modern age. The ODLT, for example, states that different subgenres arise from differences in characters, settings, plots or structures; Spang (1993) considers that they develop around form, content or both; and according to Fowler (1982) they are categorized by subject matter or motifs, substance, configuration, and the influence of neighboring genres

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