A Simple Text Analytics Model To Assist Literary Criticism: comparative approach and example on James Joyce against Shakespeare and the Bible

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple, statistical text analytics model for literary criticism that compares texts against reference works like Shakespeare and the Bible, validated on James Joyce's writings.

Contribution

It introduces a generic, statistical approach using token, sentence measures, and WordNet features with PCA for literary analysis, avoiding complex NLP techniques.

Findings

The model effectively distinguishes Joyce's works from reference texts.

Statistical measures correlate with literary style and complexity.

The approach is adaptable for different literary analyses.

Abstract

Literary analysis, criticism or studies is a largely valued field with dedicated journals and researchers which remains mostly within the humanities scope. Text analytics is the computer-aided process of deriving information from texts. In this article we describe a simple and generic model for performing literary analysis using text analytics. The method relies on statistical measures of: 1) token and sentence sizes and 2) Wordnet synset features. These measures are then used in Principal Component Analysis where the texts to be analyzed are observed against Shakespeare and the Bible, regarded as reference literature. The model is validated by analyzing selected works from James Joyce (1882-1941), one of the most important writers of the 20th century. We discuss the consistency of this approach, the reasons why we did not use other techniques (e.g. part-of-speech tagging) and the ways by which the analysis model might be adapted and enhanced.