Abstract
Critics often describe long novels as “networked”; this chapter investigates what happens when we model connections between characters in novels as social networks. Using basic metrics in network analysis, I compare a small set of contemporary U.S. novels to one another. This experiment suggests character co-occurrence, which measures the density of repeated connections between characters, as a heuristic for understanding novelistic length. Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings emerges as an outlier in this discussion because of its high character co-occurrence value. I emphasize two potential avenues of exploration based on this observation: one uses character co-occurrence as one aspect of a computational model of length; another uses character co-occurrence to inflect a close reading of the importance of intimacy in James’s novel.
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Thomas, L. (2020). Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief History of Seven Killings. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_37
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