Annotated corpora are invaluable resources for researchers in the humanities: on the one hand, for natural processing tasks, they can serve as standards against which results from new automatic methods can be measured; on the other hand, in corpus-based studies, they enable either to answer existing research questions or to explore original ones. In this respect, some annotation frameworks such...

This article addresses to what extent literary critics in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany have drawn ethnic boundaries in their reviews of ethnic minority writers between 1983 and 2009 and to what extent these boundaries have changed in the course of ethnic minority writers’ careers and across time? By analyzing newspaper reviews, we find that American reviewers less often mentio...

It is generally accepted that the practice of medicine could be improved by turning to the humanities in general, and to narrative and text interpretation in particular. Neverthless, there is hardly any agreement as to the nature of the clinical text, whether it be the patient's narrative that needs to be richly understood, or the patient as patient who must be both personally and clinically de...

In literary histories written in both Iran and the West it has generally be assumed that early modern Persian literary works are (technically inferior) copies of Western literary works. This has been and is still a claim. Almost no academically and scientifically sound works has substantiated this claim. While there is no point in denying a European influence on early modern Persian literature,...

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...

Since the emergence in the 1960s of English Language as a university subject in its own right, the relationship between the study of literature and the study of language has often been one of bitter rivalry. Literary critics have railed against the ‘cold’, ‘scientific’ approach used by scholars of language in their analyses of literary texts, whilst linguists have accused their literary colleag...

n Calibrations, Ato Quayson provides us with a highly stimulating and thoughtprovoking method by which the literary aesthetic domain is read in order to shed light on larger social processes (xv).' Although there is some fluidity in the direction of this movement of thought, the motivating factor, indeed the primary interest in the aesthetic, is to put it to use for an understanding of the "soc...

This essay surveys four articles of the section dedicated to the boundaries of fiction in literature, scientific discourse, and other areas of human creativity. The section is supposed to contribute to the study of a broad range of the problems of literary theory, such as the interaction between literature and other social practices, resulting in the creation of a particular discourse of ‘reali...

In this paper, we investigate whether longstanding literary theories about nineteenthcentury British novels can be verified using computational techniques. Elson et al. (2010) previously introduced the task of computationally validating such theories, extracting conversational networks from literary texts. Revisiting their work, we conduct a closer reading of the theories themselves, present a ...