Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Family Writing

Eleanor Dumbill (140–46)

doi:10.14434/tc.v14i1.32854

Eleanor Dumbill (140–46)

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https://doi.org/10.14434/tc.v14i1.32854

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Journal: Textual Cultures	Publication Date: Aug 9, 2021
License type: cc-by

Affiliation: Loughborough University

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The boundaries of literary genres have long been contested. Stylometric investigations of genres — for example, to identify genre through distant reading — is by no means a new area for research. Computational methods are especially useful for large corpora that have not previously been the subject of many enquiries. This might mean the work of a non-canonical author or work that has not been published. Both are true of the primary text used in this paper: a notebook of anecdotes kept by Frances Eleanor Trollope between January 1879 and March 1890. These anecdotes were written in a prose style but were only intended for the consumption of family. While these methods have been used to analyze unpublished works the aim of this research is often to attribute authorship. This paper uses stylometry to compare Trollopewith her published works of both fiction and non-fiction.

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The boundaries of literary genres have long been contested
This essay uses stylometry to investigate an unpublished ‘notebook of anecdotes’ and compares the linguistic properties of this document to those of unpublished letters and published articles written by the same author
Do the three genres have discreet linguistic fingerprints? Second, drawing on the influence of non-literary sources such as philosophy highlighted by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, can the influence of family writing be seen in published work?

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The boundaries of literary genres have long been contested. Stylometric investigations of genres — for example, to identify genre through distant reading — is by no means a new area for research. In a forthcoming article, Leah Henrickson and I found that works by several members of the Trollope family were successfully attributed to the authors we expected but were grouped according to the genre of the works in a way that we had not expected.

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