Corpus Linguistics in Literary Analysis: Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries

Corpus Linguistics in Literary Analysis provides a theoretical introduction to corpus stylistics and also demonstrates its application by presenting corpus stylistic analyses of literary texts and corpora.

The first part of the book addresses theoretical issues such as the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in corpus linguistic analyses, criteria for the evaluation of results from corpus linguistic analyses and also discusses units of meaning in language.

The second part of the book takes this theory and applies it to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and to two corpora consisting of 1) Austen's six novels and 2) texts that are contemporary with Austen. The analyses demonstrate the impact of various features of text on literary meanings and how corpus tools can extract new critical angles.

This book will be a key read for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates working in corpus linguistics and in stylistics on linguistics and language studies courses.

Bettina Fischer-Starcke is Assistant Professor at the Institute for English Business Communication, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.