Using corpus tools to analyse characterisation in literary texts: the example of Dickens

• Speaker: Dr Pablo Ruano
  
• Venue: Room 228 (Sinclair Room), Arts Building

In this workshop, I will look at how corpus tools can contribute to the analysis of literary texts. I will focus on Charles Dickens’s novels and on one of the aspects for which he is best known: his techniques of characterisation. Using a corpus-stylistic approach, I will show how the construction of fictional personalities in Dickens’s texts is significantly enhanced by strategies that have traditionally gone unnoticed in critical appreciations of his style. The tools used will be WordSmith Tools version 7 and CLiC. The aim of the workshop is to show how literary analyses can benefit from the use of relatively simple corpus methodologies.