Who wrote Shamela?: verifying the authorship of a parodic text

Title: Who wrote Shamela?: verifying the authorship of a parodic text
Creator: Burrows, John
Relation: Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol. 20, Issue 4, p. 437-450
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqi049
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2005
Description: Imitative texts of high quality are of some importance to students of attribution, especially those who use computational methods. The authorship of such texts is always likely to be difficult to demonstrate. In some cases, the identity of the author is a question of interest to literary scholars. Even when that is not so, students of attribution face a challenge. If we cannot distinguish between original and imitation in such cases, we must always concede that an imitator may have been at work. Shamela (1741) has always been regarded as a brilliant parody. When it is subjected to our standard common-words tests of authorship, it yields mixed results. A new procedure, in which special word-lists are established according to a predetermined set of rules, proves more effective. It needs, however, to be tried in other cases.
Subject: Shamela; authorship; parody; imitative texts
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/34906
Identifier: uon:3763
Identifier: ISSN:0268-1145
Language: eng
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