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This work in the field of digital literary stylistics and computational literary studies is concerned with theoretical concerns of literary genre, with the design of a corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels, and with its empirical analysis in terms of subgenres of the novel. The digital text corpus consists of 256 Argentine, Cuban, and Mexican novels from the period between 1830 and 1910. It has been created with the goal to analyze thematic subgenres and literary currents that were represented in numerous novels in the nineteenth century by means of computational text categorization methods. The texts have been gathered from different sources, encoded in the standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and enriched with detailed bibliographic and subgenre-related metadata, as well as with structural information.
To categorize the texts, statistical classification and a family resemblance analysis relying on network analysis are used with the aim to examine how the subgenres, which are understood as communicative, conventional phenomena, can be captured on the stylistic, textual level of the novels that participate in them. The result is that both thematic subgenres and literary currents are textually coherent to degrees of 70–90 %, depending on the individual subgenre constellation, meaning that the communicatively established subgenre classifications can be accurately captured to this extent in terms of textually defined classes.
Besides the empirical focus, the dissertation also aims to relate literary theoretical genre concepts to the ones used in digital genre stylistics and computational literary studies as subfields of digital humanities. It is argued that literary text types, conventional literary genres, and textual literary genres should be distinguished on a theoretical level to improve the conceptualization of genre for digital text analysis.
Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul’s native island, is consistently represented in the 2001 Nobel Prize winner’s fictional works, above all in "The Mystic Masseur" (1957), "The Suffrage of Elvira" (1958), "Miguel Street" (1959), "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), "A Flag on the Island" (1967), "The Mimic Men" (1967), "In a Free State" (1971), "Guerrillas" (1975), "The Enigma of Arrival" (1987) and "A Way in the World" (1994). The present dissertation analyses representations of Trinidad as “play-culture” in the aforementioned writings by initiating a methodological dialogue between postcolonial/cultural studies on the one hand and performance studies, play theory, as well as cultural anthropology on the other hand. The study is divided into three parts corresponding to the three main facets of Trinidad as it appears in Naipaul’s fiction: firstly, as a childish world; secondly, as a festive place and thirdly, as a playground for the western imagination. The image of Trinidad as a childish space stands at the intersection of the autobiographical genre with the colonial/Social Darwinist discourse of the so-called “child races”. In both cases we have to do with a cultural construct of childhood whose main stereotypical features are smallness, imitation, irrationality and of course, playfulness. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the importance of rituals and festivals in shaping up Indian and African identities in Trinidad. Roughly, Hindu rituals are capital means to create diasporic Indias, whereas Carnival is a powerful symbol of the Afro-Trinidadian community. Nevertheless, they carry the potential of becoming genuine liminal spaces, where ethnic boundaries are transgressed. The third section is devoted to a discourse of play as imagination. In this respect, Trinidad appears as an adventure playground where the Westerner projects his/her desires, sometimes under the mask of scientific respectability. The eye of the European sees the tropical island as an exotic Garden of Eden, as an aesthetic space with strong pictorial and theatrical qualities. But if Trinidad occurs as an artistic, a fictional object, then Naipaul’s novels and stories describing it are fiction about fiction, and so have a very important metafictional component. At this stage, since metafiction is also a capital element of postmodernism, I trace back Naipaul’s ludic metaphors to the present-day Zeitgeist, pointing out the postmodern elements in his texts dealing with Trinidad.
In spite of David Lodge’s rejection of the theories labelled as poststructuralist, this thesis proves that his novels can be interpreted from a Foucauldian perspective. The concept of discourse, seen by the French philosopher as intricately linked with knowledge, power and truth, enables the distinction of four main discourses in Lodge’s novels, religious, gender, ethnic and literary. The analysis reveals that in David Lodge’s fiction there is a perpetual struggle for power illustrating Foucault’s idea of the interdependence between power, knowledge, truth and discourses circulated by institutions.