Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn: Words of Passion

Aphra Behn (1640–1689), prolific and popular playwright, poet, novelist, translator, has a fascinating and extensive corpus of literature that plays a key role in literary history. Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn: Words of Passion offers what no book has done to date, an analysis of all Behn’s literary output. It examines the author’s use of words in terms of frequencies and distributions and stacks the words in context to read Behn’s word usage synchronically. Using this experimental method, the book brings digital humanities into literary criticism, to enhance our understanding and appreciation of literature beyond what is possible in diachronic reading and scholarship less supported by digital means. The empirical approach works in collaboration with existing scholarship to understand Behn’s distinct language of love and extreme passions across her genres.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents; Acknowledgements; Note on Texts and Data; List of Figures and Tables; Preface; Introduction; Chapter One: The Poetry of Love; Chapter Two: The Drama of Love; Chapter Three: The Prose of Love; Conclusion; Appendices; Index.

About the Author :
Laura L. Runge is a professor of English at the University of South Florida. She specialises in women's writing of the long eighteenth century, digital humanities, and book history.

Review :
“Runge’s wide-ranging analysis draws deeply on her own rich familiarity with Behn’s works, a bang up-to-date knowledge of their critical reception and a carefully designed, computer-aided analysis of the texts. The result is a tour de force, a fascinating exploration of Behn in the passions of her times. I learned from this book, argued with it and loved it.” — Professor Elaine Hobby, Loughborough University, Principal Investigator of Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age. “This book applies quantitative literary analysis to Aphra Behn’s works across and within genres: poetry, drama and prose. Runge integrates distant reading with traditional approaches in an original way that examines Behn’s language, ideas and works in their early modern contexts while also asking us to consider how we interpret literature today.” — Dr. Laura Estill, Associate Professor of English, St. Francis Xavier University. “Laura Runge’s illuminating book uses concordance data to offer a fresh interpretation of Aphra Behn’s works. Her astute application of quantitative analysis deepens our understanding of Behn as an amatory writer, revealing the unique aspects of her delineation of love and showing how she prefigures the psychological interiority developed in the eighteenth-century novel.” — Jane Spencer, Professor Emerita of English Literature, University of Exeter.  For scholars of Behn and the larger world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century dramatic writers, Runge provides an excellent model for successfully re-establishing how these specific lexical items help unlock the promise of quantification to understand language at scale. [...] Researchers—especially graduate students—who are looking for new directions in formal analysis will benefit immensely from this book, especially as a starting point to find other key terms to analyze and methods to consider. - Eighteenth-Century Fiction