I know no speck so troublesome as self: Finding Middlemarch through Corpus Linguistics
Dr Rosalind White proposes a way into George Eliot’s Middlemarch using corpus linguistics.
Dr Rosalind White proposes a way into George Eliot’s Middlemarch using corpus linguistics.
In this blog post, I’d like to explore how corpus linguistic tools can be used to illuminate the semantic texture of George Eliot’s writing. I make use of the CLiC Web App (Mahlberg et al. 2020). From the outset, George Eliot frames Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871) as a pseudo-scientific sample of the complex human dynamics that can be found in a provincial town. Using the metaphor of an optical microscope, the narrator vows to concentrate ‘all the light [they] can command’ on ‘unravelling certain human lots and seeing how they [are] woven and interwoven’ (102). Read more...