Original and American:

Introduction, Corpus and Methods

Context

• Project “Computational Literary Genre Stylistics” (CLiGS), University of Würzburg, 2015-2020, https://cligs.hypotheses.org/
• Dissertation "Genre Analysis and Corpus Design: 19th Century Spanish American Novels (1830-1910)"
  • Bib-ACMé: Bibliografía digital de novelas argentinas, cubanas y mexicanas (1830-1910), http://bibacme.cligs.digital-humanities.de/
  • Conha19: Corpus de novelas hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX, https://github.com/cligs/conha19

Identity labels (1)

courtesy of HathiTrust, source: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100517869

courtesy of HathiTrust, source: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100327394

Identity labels (2)

Internet Archive, digitized by Google, source: https://archive.org/details/lacampanadelata00rosagoog

courtesy of HathiTrust, source: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011638496

Relevance of the topic

• Spanish America: struggle for independence in the 19th century
• process of nation building
• development of a cultural identity
• role of the novel in this process (Brushwood 1966, Sommer 1993, Lindstrom 2004) -> use of identity labels in subtitles -> no systematic analysis so far

Bibliography and corpus

Bib-ACMé & Conha19

Conha19

Codification of subgenre labels

• in TEI
• by work (= all editions)
• only explicit historical labels
• normalization
  e.g. of "novela histórica original", "novela de costumbres mexicanas"
  -> "novela histórica", "novela original", "novela de costumbres", "novela mexicana"
• categorization (theme, mode, literary current, identity)
• grouping
  e.g. "novela camagüeyana" -> "novela cubana"

Questions

• How many identity labels of which type are there?
• Do they correlate with other levels of genre such as thematic subgenres or literary currents?
• Are they connected to certain extra-textual or textual characteristics of the texts (e.g. period of publication, geographic setting, text style)?

Methods

• Analysis on the levels of metadata and text
• Statistical charts
• Contrastive analyses (Burrows 2007, Craig and Kinney 2009, Hoover 2013)
• Stylo (Eder et al. 2016)

Results and Discussion

Results: identity labels

novels with identity labels: Bib-ACMé: 273 (33%), Conha19: 101 (39%)

Analysis: identity labels over time

Works with an identity label, by decade

Groups of identity labels

Group Labels novela original novela original novela americana novela americana, novela argentina, novela azteca, novela bonaerense, novela camagüeyana, novela criolla, novela cubana, novela de Tabasco, novela franco-argentina, novela habanera, novela india, novela kantabro-americana, novela mexicana, novela mixteca, novela porteña, novela suriana, novela tapatía, novela yucateca novela mexicana novela azteca, novela de Tabasco, novela mexicana, novela mixteca, novela suriana, novela tapatía, novela yucateca novela argentina novela argentina, novela bonaerense, novela franco-argentina, novela porteña novela cubana novela camagüeyana, novela cubana, novela habanera

Bib-ACMé: Conha19:

Analysis: novela original

over time and by country (Bib-ACMé)

	time: + early
	country: + Mexico + Cuba - Argentina

Analysis: novela original

by subgenre and literary current (Bib-ACMé)

	subgenre: + sentimental + political
	literary current: + romantic + modernist

Analysis: novela original

continent and time period of setting (Conha19)

	continent of setting: + Europe
	time period of setting: + recent past + contemporary - past

Analysis: novela original

words preferred and avoided (Stylo, Conha19) words preferred/avoided: + sentimental - historical

Analysis: novela americana

property values period x country + Cuba = Mexico - Argentina continent of setting + America time period of setting + recent past = past - contemporary subgenre + costumbres + historical literary current + realist - modernist narrative perspective + third person words preferred/avoided + forms of address x

Analysis: identity types

Conclusions

• tendencies can by observed for novels with different types of identity labels, e.g.:
  • novela original: early, European setting, sentimental, romantic -> linguistic identity (Botrel 2001)
  • novela americana: American setting, historical, costumbres, realist, set in recent past, third person narrator
• but: statistical significance unclear!
• more types of textual features could be tested

Thank you!

Slides at: https://hennyu.github.io/romtag_21/

Data at: https://github.com/hennyu/papers/tree/master/original_american_romtag21

CC-BY 4.0

References

• Botrel, Jean-François (2001): “La novela, género editorial (España, 1830-1930)”, in: La novela en España en los siglos XIX y XX. Historia, sociedad, búsqueda identitaria [Online]. Edited by Paul Aubert. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez: 35-51.
• Brushwood, John S. (1966). Mexico in its Novel. A Nation’s Search for Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Burrows, John (2007): “All the Way Through: Testing for Authorship in Different Frequency Strata”, in: Literary and Linguistic Computing 22 (1): 27-47. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqi067
• Craig, Hugh and Arthur F. Kinney (2009). Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Eder, Maciej, Jan Rybicki, and Mike Kestemont (2016): “Stylometry with R: a package for computational text analysis”, in: R Journal 8 (1): 107-121.
• Hoover, David L. (2013): “Textual Analysis”, in: Literary Studies in the Digital Age. New York: MLA. https://dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/textual-analysis/.
• Lindstrom, Naomi (2004). Early Spanish American Narrative. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Sommer, Doris (1993). Foundational Fictions. The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.