In his article, "Literary Careers: Breaks and Stalls," W. Ray Crozier argues that biographical evidence points to considerable individual variation in writers' output over the life span even when allowance is made for longevity and length of writing career. This issue has been neglected by psychological accounts of creativity. Crozier outlines a theoretical framework for understanding variation...

The story of Joseph has been praised as a treasure of world literature. Voltaire confessed it is one of the most precious documents handed down to our own age from antiquity. Neither Egypt nor Babylon can offer anything even remotely comparable. The matchless narrative of the lost son moves old and young alike. As a literary work, it is artistic perfection. The literary genius of The Joseph Nar...

In the Czech language there exists, aside from the ‘literary’ (standard) language, a spoken form, which is generally regarded as a special and independent code. It has been known as Common Czech (hereafter CC) since Havránek (1934). The differences between CC and the Czech Literary Language (hereafter LC) are quite substantial. They concern not only the lexicon, phraseology and syntax, but also...

Studying Literary History with Latent Feature Models

A major challenge of literature is that it is stubbornly indeterminate. Both a vice and a virtue, the indeterminateness of literary language has acquired the status of an impasse, one which was perhaps most directly and resolutely faced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Stéphane Mallarmé. The question of whether the indeterminateness of literary language is a vice or a virtue, however, has rarely been tr...

This article uses psychological and neural theories to illuminate the use of analogies in literary allegories. It shows how new theories of neural representation, encompassing both cognitive and emotional aspects, have the potential to make sense of many kinds of literary comparisons including allegories. The main text analyzed is George Orwell’s Animal Farm, whose effectiveness is discussed us...