Implications of vocabulary density for poetry: Reading T. S. Eliot’s poetry through computational methods

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seonghoon Kim ◽  
Jin-young Tak ◽  
Eun Joo Kwak ◽  
Tae Yun Lim ◽  
Shin Haeng Lee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Computational Methods ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Research ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Poetic Diction

Abstract By incorporating computational methods into reading literary texts, this study examines the literary implications of the ‘vocabulary density’ and frequency of nouns and adjectives in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. This study analyzes 4,689,655 words from forty-seven poets available on Project Gutenberg, a catalog spanning from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The data illustrate both the continuity and discontinuity found in English and American poetry dependent on conventional divisions between literary movements: eighteenth century, Romanticism, Imagism, and Modernism. The findings shed light on the similarities and differences between Eliot’s poetry and others’, particularly in terms of Franco Moretti’s concept of ‘modern epic’ and his methodology of ‘distant reading’. Through this combined quantitative and qualitative research, this article ultimately upholds the notion that the linguistic distinction of Eliot’s high modernist poetry lies, by and large, in his use of invented and equivocal words that reflects and represents an artistic response to modern human, cultural, social conditions, and experiment with poetic diction and polyphonic voice in the early twentieth century.

Orphans of the Empire: Lhasa’s Chinese Community from the Qing Era to the Early Twentieth Century

Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042096992
Author(s):  
Huasha Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Chinese Population ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Academic Assessment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This article analyzes the transformation of Lhasa’s Chinese community from the embodiment of an expansionist power in the early eighteenth century to the orphan of a fallen regime after the Qing Empire’s demise in 1911. Throughout the imperial era, this remote Chinese enclave represented Qing authority in Tibet and remained under the metropole’s strong political and social influence. Its members intermarried with the locals and adopted many Tibetan cultural traits. During the years surrounding the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, this community played a significant role in a series of interconnected political and ethnic confrontations that gave birth to the two antagonistic national bodies of Tibet and China. The community’s history and experiences challenge not only the academic assessment that Tibet’s Chinese population had fully assimilated into Tibetan society by the twentieth century but also the widespread image of pre-1951 Lhasa as a harmonious town of peaceful ethnic coexistence.

Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton: The Disruption of Domestic Bliss

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARTEMIS MICHAILIDOU
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
New Woman ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Second Wave

Popular perceptions of Edna St. Vincent Millay do not generally see her as a poet interested in so-called “domestic poetry.” On the contrary, Millay is most commonly described as the female embodiment of the rebellious spirit that marked the 1920s, the “New Woman” of early twentieth-century feminism. Until the late 1970s, the subject of domesticity seemed incompatible with the celebrated images of Millay's “progressiveness,” “rebelliousness,” or “originality.” But then again, by the 1970s Millay was no longer seen as particularly rebellious or original, and the fact that she had also contributed to the tradition of domestic poetry was not to her advantage. Domesticity may have been an important issue for second-wave feminists, but it was discussed rather selectively and, outside feminist circles, Millay was hardly ever mentioned by literary critics. The taint of “traditionalism” did not help Millay's cause, and the poet's lifelong exploration of sexuality, femininity and gender stereotypes was somehow not enough to generate sophisticated critical analyses. Since Millay seemed to be a largely traditional poet and a “politically incorrect” feminist model, second-wave feminists preferred to focus on other figures, classified as more modern and more overtly subversive. Scholarly recognition of Millay's significance within the canon of modern American poetry did not really begin until the 1990s.

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

Yokes of Gold and Threads of Silk: Sino-Tibetan competition for authority in early twentieth century Kham

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT RELYEA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indirect Influence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

AbstractBeginning in the early eighteenth century, a bifurcated structure of authority in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet frustrated attempts by both the Lhasa and Beijing governments to assert their unquestioned control over a myriad polities in the borderlands between Sichuan and Tibet. A tenuous accommodation of this structure persisted from the early eighteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century when powerful globalizing norms—territoriality and sovereignty—transformed both the understanding and expectations of territorial rule held by Qing and, later, Republican Chinese officials. Absolutist conceptions of these norms prompted an ambitious endeavour to shatter the bifurcated structure and undermine the Dalai Lama's spiritual influence on Kham society. Infrontier imperialism is used to analyse the incomplete implementation of resulting acculturative and incorporative policies, inflected by these two norms, which challenged the monasteries’ indirect influence on the lay rulers of Kham, initiating a struggle for authority that persists to this day.

scholarly journals Tracing the lexical features of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 47-56
Author(s):  
Mykola Verbovyi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Quantitative Composition ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Lexical Composition

The article analyzes the most important lexical features of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works of art. The researcher concludes that the playwright in his texts used words or individual forms characteristic of the steppe subdialects of the late nineteenth – early twentieth century. The analysis of words is made with the involvement of a wide range of factual material extracted from various lexicographical, ethnographic sources, as well as artistic texts of other authors. It has been established that the lexical composition of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works reveals organic connections with the vocabulary of the adjacent Poltava and Podil dialects, and more broadly with the eastern and western dialects of the Ukrainian language. It is also noted that the analyzed words show a significant influence on the steppe subdialects and on the Ukrainian language in general Polish, Russian and Romanian. Thus, the study suggests that the playwright’s literary texts recorded and preserved the original local phonetic, word-forming or semantic derivatives that complement and deepen our knowledge of general trends in the lexical systems of Eastern Ukrainian dialects and the Ukrainian literary language. Consideration of only a small number of words (approximately 20 nouns) that function in the works of Marko Kropyvnytskyi, determines the prospects for further research to establish the quantitative composition of such names and a systematic description of phonetic, word-forming or semantic features in connection with other dialects and literary language. It follows from the above that the texts of M. Kropyvnytskyi are an important source for the study of linguistic features and steppe subdialects, and the Ukrainian literary language of the early twentieth century.

A Brownian Model for Literary Crowds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Motion ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Model ◽  
Night And Day

Chapter 6 applies the ideas explored in Chapter 5 to a range of early twentieth-century literary texts, especially those by Woolf and Lawrence. The focus here is on crowd and city scenes, including the modernist figures of the flâneur and the passante. The chapter as a whole argues for the relevance of contemporary ideas on molecular physics, especially Brownian motion, to portrayals of individual characters in relation to crowds, drawing on a range of texts including Woolf’s Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway, Lawrence’s The Trespasser and The White Peacock, and texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and H. G. Wells. Together with Chapter 5, this chapter demonstrates how ideas, language, and imagery were shared across disciplines in the early twentieth century, and argues that considering different disciplines together can help us to recapture a sense of the ways in which particular issues were experienced at the time.

North America

2021 ◽  
pp. 462-478
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Study

This chapter assesses the main strands of Edwards’s reception in North America from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Most Americans did not know much, if anything, about Edwards until decades after his death, when various—often conflicting—views of Edwards appeared. New Divinity ministers expanded his theological vison while revivalists, including Charles G. Finney, enlisted Edwards’s legacy for their purposes, and thousands of evangelicals embraced Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd. Edwards intrigued (and offended) writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his condemnation of sin caught the interest of antislavery advocates in the Civil War. His legacy helped to shape the rise of American literature as a discipline, leading to the widespread academic study of Edwards that exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with over 5000 books, dissertations, articles, and theses published on Edwards.

Manilamen and seafaring: engaging the maritime world beyond the Spanish realm

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filomeno V. Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

AbstractAlthough the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others engaged in mercenary activities. They settled in key ports around the world, their numbers in any one location fluctuating in response to changing circumstances. Despite relocation to distant places, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization, Manilamen seem to have retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined.

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