This article places the Kenyan intellectual Ngũ gũ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) in what has until now been seen as a predominantly Latin American tradition of dictator novels. Dictator novels unmask the intrinsic fallibility of power. The purported omnipotence of the dictator is undermined by dictation: that is, by his power’s reliance on the shifty and ambiguous medium of language, ...

Stylometric analysis of prose is typically limited to classification tasks such as authorship attribution. Since the models used are typically black boxes, they give little insight into the stylistic differences they detect. In this paper, we characterize two prose genres syntactically: chick lit (humorous novels on the challenges of being a modern-day urban female) and high literature. First, ...

This study focuses on Arashi ha Mujyō Monogatari (“The Tale of Transient Popular Kabuki Actor Arashi’s Life”; 1688), a novel from the early modern Japanese literature, written by Saikaku Ihara (1642–93). It is a first work of a Kabuki actor’s life in Japan (Kabuki is a traditional stage arts performed exclusively by male actors with the accompaniment of live music and songs). Then we will exami...

The history of the colonial world is interpreted differently by western historians and “nativist” historians and ethnologists. The colonialist perspective of history often disregards an entire phase of history before the colonial period, exalting the colonialist enterprise. On the other hand, ethnologists and native historians stress indigenous sources of history, including oral accounts. The p...

We present a deterministic sieve-based system for attributing quotations in literary text and a new dataset: QuoteLi31. Quote attribution, determining who said what in a given text, is important for tasks like creating dialogue systems, and in newer areas like computational literary studies, where it creates opportunities to analyze novels at scale rather than only a few at a time. We release Q...

Representations of Sigmund Freud in early 21st century US American novels rely on and respond to the image of Freud that emerged from investigations by Paul Roazen ("Brother Animal," 1969) and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson ("The Assault on Truth," 1984), which cast doubt on the validity of the Oedipus complex. Relying on Roazen, Brenda Webster's "Vienna Triangle" (2009) links Freud's oedipal thinki...

The study of novels and the analysis of their plot, characters and other entities are time-consuming and complex tasks in literary science. The digitization of literature and the proliferation of electronic books provide new opportunities to support these tasks with visual abstractions. Methods from the fields of computational linguistics can be used to automatically extract entities and their ...

Abstract This research attempts to study China’s image in contemporary Arabic novels through four modal novels: The Queen Kisses the Dragon Over its Mouth by Amin Zaoui from Algeria, Fleet of Sun Ali Al-Hajri Qatar, Trilogy Beidaihe and Spring Autumn Hanna Mina Syria. researcher seeks answer following questions. How was China represented these as others? And how did represent self? Also, deline...

The current research investigated the psychological differences between protagonists and antagonists in literature and the impact of these differences on readers. It was hypothesized that protagonists would embody cooperative motives and behaviors that are valued by egalitarian hunter-gatherers groups, whereas antagonists would demonstrate status-seeking and dominance behaviors that are stigmat...