Studying Literary History with Latent Feature Models

A major challenge of literature is that it is stubbornly indeterminate. Both a vice and a virtue, the indeterminateness of literary language has acquired the status of an impasse, one which was perhaps most directly and resolutely faced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Stéphane Mallarmé. The question of whether the indeterminateness of literary language is a vice or a virtue, however, has rarely been tr...

This article uses psychological and neural theories to illuminate the use of analogies in literary allegories. It shows how new theories of neural representation, encompassing both cognitive and emotional aspects, have the potential to make sense of many kinds of literary comparisons including allegories. The main text analyzed is George Orwell’s Animal Farm, whose effectiveness is discussed us...

Many scientific authors--among them famous names such as Henri Gastaut or Sigmund Freud--dealt with the question from what kind of epilepsy Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky (1821-1881) might had suffered. Because of the tight interplay between Dostoevsky's literary work and his own disease we throw light on the author's epilepsy against the background of his epileptic fictional characters. Moreo...

World Literature, traditionally known as Comparative Literature, draws together literatures and cultures of a wide variety of countries and regions. Western and non-Western literary traditions are included in the curriculum, which emphasizes overall the junction – and not division of the past and present, ancient and modern. Ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome – the roots of Classical Traditio...

Paradox is one of the literary techniques in the poetry of the Safavid poets. Hazin-e Lahiji, like so many other poets of that age, employed this technique in his pursuit and showed that "unfamiliar meaning". Paradox is used in the poetry of Hazin-e Lahiji for the purpose of defamiliarization and exoticism. The poet in order to create new implications and subtle and insightful points and also t...

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, crime fiction is a topranking literary genre, and has become part of mainstream culture. The crime novel’s position of pre-eminence derives from its broad fan base and its readership, with publishing houses devoting whole series and large print runs to the genre. Evidence of the prevalence of a popular obsession with crime stories is also to be foun...

Many existing approaches for measuring text complexity tend to overestimate the complexity levels of informational texts while simultaneously underestimating the complexity levels of literary texts. We present a two-stage estimation technique that successfully addresses this problem. At Stage 1, each text is classified into one or another of three possible genres: informational, literary or mix...