This essay surveys four articles of the section dedicated to the boundaries of fiction in literature, scientific discourse, and other areas of human creativity. The section is supposed to contribute to the study of a broad range of the problems of literary theory, such as the interaction between literature and other social practices, resulting in the creation of a particular discourse of ‘reali...

In this paper, we investigate whether longstanding literary theories about nineteenthcentury British novels can be verified using computational techniques. Elson et al. (2010) previously introduced the task of computationally validating such theories, extracting conversational networks from literary texts. Revisiting their work, we conduct a closer reading of the theories themselves, present a ...

much less certain precisely how the aesthetic codification occurs, or what theoretical encounters of this variety would have done for narratives already encoded in existing literary forms. For example, what would Good make of the narrative encodement of Emma Bovary's illness or the stories of the famous ailing figures in Proust and Mann? Did they not also have significant anthropological contex...

he story is told of a young boy who returned home from church one Sunday morning and, over lunch, talked with his parents about the events of the day. “And what did you study in Sunday school today, John?” asked his mother. “We learned about Daniel,” he replied, “about Daniel and his houses.” The devout lady knew quite a bit about the book of Daniel, but she had never heard of Daniel’s houses. ...

This paper describes the Quantitative Criticism Lab, a collaborative initiative between classicists, quantitative biologists, and computer scientists to apply ideas and methods drawn from the sciences to the study of literature. A core goal of the project is the use of computational biology, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques to investigate authorial style, intertextua...

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In his article, "Literary Careers: Breaks and Stalls," W. Ray Crozier argues that biographical evidence points to considerable individual variation in writers' output over the life span even when allowance is made for longevity and length of writing career. This issue has been neglected by psychological accounts of creativity. Crozier outlines a theoretical framework for understanding variation...

The story of Joseph has been praised as a treasure of world literature. Voltaire confessed it is one of the most precious documents handed down to our own age from antiquity. Neither Egypt nor Babylon can offer anything even remotely comparable. The matchless narrative of the lost son moves old and young alike. As a literary work, it is artistic perfection. The literary genius of The Joseph Nar...