We study the variation of word frequencies in Russian literary texts. Our findings indicate that the standard deviation of a word’s frequency across texts depends on its average frequency according to a power lawwith exponent 2 < α < 1, which shows that the rarer words have a relatively larger degree of frequency volatility (that is, higher ‘‘burstiness’’). A latent factor model has been estima...

In conclusion, we should like to add two admonitions. First, criticism is an art, not the raw tables or summaries of scholarship. The scholarship is a necessary prerequisite, and the formal reports, the compilations of the learned monograph, are essential to criticism. We have too much of unimaginative word counting, the pedestrian assemblage of arguments, the methodical and generalized comment...

With the development of Bakhtin's theory of polyphony in literary criticism, the kind of attitude to literary texts has changed, and according to the needs of modern society, this discourse became the focus of attention of thinkers and literary theorists. Polyphony, with its own meta-lingual potentials, brings with it a new approach, a rethinking of the audience, so that the reader can have a n...

In the history of the United States, the years following the Civil War symbolized a time of healing and rebuilding. However, for those engaged in serious literary circles that period was full of upheaval. In fact, it can be said that a “literary civil war” raged on between the camps of the romantics and the realists and later, the naturalists (“History 426”). What was caught in between was the ...