This book explores the works of Aphra Behn (16401689) synchronically through word counts and statistical measures.
It analyses, by genre, poetry, drama, and prose, examining the quantification of Behn's literary style. The conclusion applies thematic questions to the full corpus for an innovative and comprehensive assessment of Behn's writing.
Aphra Behn (16401689), prolific and popular playwright, poet, novelist, and translator, has a fascinating and extensive corpus of literature that plays a key role in literary history. This book offers an analysis of all of Behn's literary output. It examines the author's use of words in terms of frequencies and distributions and stacks the oeuvre in order to read Behn's word usage synchronically. Organised into three main chapters addressing her chief genres of writing (poetry, plays, and prose) this exploratory project analyses the texts through statistical queries and identifies Behn's unique style across genres and among her peers. It identifies Behn's keywords as compared to literary works of the period to provide an index of characteristic themes and qualities, such as 'oh', 'young', 'lover', 'love', 'marry', 'charming', 'heart', 'gay', 'soft'. Each of these words opens a window on her corpus as a whole. A unique case study of a significant author using new literary methodologies, this book provides an appealing snapshot of Behn's whole career informed by deep knowledge of the Restoration era and developments in digital humanities and cultural analytics.
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
Runge’s rich quantitative literary analysis sits at two poles of academic research. First, Runge focuses on some of the most qualitative content possible. ... Second, Runge’s quantitative methods focalize and extend Behn’s meanings.— SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
