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On the distinction between a novel and a romance: A discriminant analysis

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References

  1. René Wellek and Austin Warren,Theory of Literature (1949; rpt. New York: Harcourt, 1956).

  2. Barron Brainerd, “An Exploratory Study of Pronouns and Articles as Indices of Genre in English,”Language and Style 5 (1972), pp. 239–59. Other investigations of pronoun-frequency as an indication of genre and formality of speech can be found in two works of Charles Müller, “Les pronoms de dialogue; interprétation stylistique d’une statistique de mots grammaticaux dans français moderne,”Actes du X 0 Congrès de Linguistique et Philologie romane (1962) (Paris, 1965), pp. 605–12, and “Sur quelques scènes de Molière, Essai d’un indice du style familier,”le Français moderne 30 (1962), pp. 99–108. Article studies are referred to in the work cited in footnote 6 below.

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  3. R.A. Fisher, “The Statistical Utilization of Multiple Measurements,”Annals of Eugenics 8 (1938), 376–86. See also D.F. Morrison,Multivariate Statistical Methods (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), pp. 130–33.

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  4. The general program using canonical objects to set up a classificatory system which can be used to classify other objects is one of the cornerstones of taxonomic biology. See R.R. Sokal and P.H.A. Sneath,Principles of Numerical Taxonomy (San Francisco: Freeman, 1963) for a readable account of taxonomic procedures. For an account of their use in linguistics, see H.T. Carvell and J. Svartvik,Computational Experiments in Grammatical Classification (The Hague: Mouton, 1969).

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  5. Barron Brainerd, “Article Use as an Indicator of Style among English-Language Authors,” in S. Jäger, ed.,Linguistik und Statistik (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1972), pp. 11–32.

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  6. See I.M. Chakravarti, R.G. Laha, and J. Roy,Handbook of Methods of Applied Statistics (New York: Wiley, 1967), I, 342–43.

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  7. Ibid., pp. 416–18.

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  8. Here we are essentially choosing the best pair of coefficients (a, b) minimizing the ratio under discussion. Actually this can be done only up to a multiplicative constant, so that if the pair (a, b) will do the job, so will (c a, c b) wherec is an arbitrary constant. See S.S. Wilks,Mathematical Statistics (New York: Wiley, 1962), pp. 573–76.

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  9. This method is a variation of that used in F. Mosteller and D.L. Wallace,Influence and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1964), pp. 210–11.

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  10. L.P. Stebbins and R.P. Stebbins,The Trollopes, The Chronicle of a Writing Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 134. From James Pope Hennessy,Anthony Trollope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 30, we have: “His third novel,La Vendée, a dull historical tale in the manner of Alexandre Dumas, was also a failure.” In the minds of the critics of the time,La Vendée was a romance, as the following quotes from unsigned reviews indicate.Examiner, 15 June 1850, pp. 373–74: “His book [La Vendée] has the fiction of a romance, but with a little too much of the phlegm of history ...,” andAthenaeum, 6 July 1850, p. 708: “[La Vendée] might also be called a ‘romantic history’ instead of a historical romance ....” Trollope himself has surprisingly little to say about the book.

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  11. Henry Kučera and W.N. Francis,Computational Analysis of Present-day American English (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1967).

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  12. George Sampson,The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1970), 3rd edition, revised by R.C. Churchill, pp. 641–42.

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  13. See Louis T. Milic,A Quantitative Approach to the Style of Jonathan Swift (The Hague, 1967), chapter VI, and Robert Cluett, “Style, Precept, Personality: A Test Case (Thomas Sprat, 1635–1713),”Computers and the Humanities 5 (1971), 257–77.

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I wish to thank my co-workers, C. C. Chow, who assisted in the word counts and performed the programming, and Janet Gould and Victoria Neufeldt, both of whom assisted in the word counts. I also wish to thank the National Research Council of Canada whose Grant A5252 supported the work.

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Brainerd, B. On the distinction between a novel and a romance: A discriminant analysis. Comput Hum 7, 259–270 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02395426

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