- Title
- Anonymity, individuality and commonality in writing in British periodicals - 1830 to 1890: a computational stylistics approach
- Creator
- Antonia, Alexis
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- The aim of the thesis is to use computational stylistics, and in particular the methods pioneered by John Burrows, to explore aspects of the nineteenth-century periodical genre. Published for the most part anonymously, periodical articles were written by an extraordinary range of authors on an incredible variety of topics. The standard of writing in the thousands of articles appearing in the ‘higher’ or ‘literary’ journals has generally been agreed by scholars to be ‘remarkably good’. Beginning in 1802 and flourishing for most of the century, this outstanding genre of writing had all but disappeared by the beginning of the twentieth century. The text collection for the thesis consists of almost two million words by twenty-two authors. My study employs a variety of statistical tests on these texts to examine the effect of such factors as anonymity, commonality, authorial individuality, gender, house-style, text-type and chronology on the periodicals. I begin by taking a broad view of the field: first allowing the articles to ‘speak for themselves’ and to exhibit their commonalities and individual differences; then exploring the significance of both the intra-generic focus of the article – the stance taken in a particular article – and the author’s own idiosyncratic preferences in determining the incidence of function words in these articles. The interplay between these two factors provided an explanation as to why the articles of some authors invariably grouped together while those of other authors displayed marked variability. The use of lists of authorial ‘marker words’ – those words used relatively more or relatively less frequently by individual authors – showed that one can think of this large group of mostly anonymous periodical articles as a set of authorial oeuvres. I also look at the frequently made assertion that authors adapted their writing to the ‘house style’ of particular journals, and come to the conclusion that it does not significantly affect the deeper level of style revealed by function word usage. I then examine the question of whether or not there are differences between men’s and women’s usages of function words, coming to the conclusion that, although differences can be seen to exist, it is not at present possible to come up with sets of ‘marker words’ that reveal gender in the way that is possible with authorship. I use ‘marker words’ to identify the characteristics of one major author, George Eliot, and to show how she modified her stylistic practices when she moved from the periodical essay to fiction. I demonstrate how the techniques of computational stylistics can be used to check the legitimacy of some of the attributions made in the Wellesley Index, and I attribute one much-discussed anonymous group of articles on ‘the woman question’ to Robert Cecil 3rd Marquess of Salisbury and Prime Minister of England.
- Subject
- British periodicals; computational stylistics; Wellesley Index; Women's Movement; gender; Burrows' method; nineteenth century; house style; authorial style; intra-generic focus; anonymity; attribution; George Eliot
- Identifier
- uon:6075
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/802334
- Rights
- Copyright 2009 Alexis Antonia
- Language
- eng
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