Approaches to Corpus Stylistics: The Corpus, the Computer And the Study of Literature

Digital Literary Studies presents a broad and varied picture of the promise and potential of methods and approaches that are crucially dependent upon the digital nature of the literary texts it studies and the texts and collections of texts with which they are compared. It focuses on style, diction, characterization, and interpretation of single works and across larger groups of texts, using both huge natural language corpora and smaller, more specialized collections of texts created for specific tasks, and applies statistical techniques used in the narrower confines of authorship attribution to broader stylistic questions. It addresses important issues in each of the three major literary genres, and intentionally applies different techniques and concepts to poetry, prose, and drama. It aims to present a provocative and suggestive sample intended to encourage the application of these and other methods to literary studies.

Hoover, Culpeper, and O’Halloran push the methods, techniques, and concepts in new directions, apply them to new groups of texts or to new questions, modify their nature or method of application, and combine them in innovative ways.

David L. Hoover is Professor of English at New York University, USA. His publications in stylistics and digital humanities include three books–A New Theory of Old English Meter, Language and Style in The Inheritors, and Stylistics: Prospect and Retrospect–and numerous articles on authorship attribution and corpus and computational stylistics.

Jonathan Culpeper is Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. His major publications include Language and Characterisation in Plays and Other Texts (2001) and Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing (2010; co-authored with Merja Kytö).

Kieran O’Halloran is a Reader in Applied Linguistics at King's College, University of London, UK. Publications include Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Cognition (2003), The Art of English: Literary Creativity (2006 with Goodman) and Applied Linguistics Methods (Routledge, 2010 with Coffin and Lillis).