Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T16:49:04.756Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
Series:   Elements in Digital Literary Studies

Actual Fictions

Literary Representation and Character Network Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2022

Roel Smeets
Roel Smeets
Affiliation:
Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

Summary

This Element sheds a new light on the ubiquitous yet complex notion of mimesis. By systematically comparing the social dynamics of the Dutch population at a given time with the social dynamics of characters in Dutch literary fiction published in the same period, it aims to pinpoint the ways in and the extent with which literary fiction either mirrors or shapes the societal context from which it emerged. While close-reading-based scholarship on this topic has been limited to qualitative interpretations of allegedly exemplary works, the present study uses the data-driven tools of social network analysis to systematically determine the imitative elements of the social dynamics of characters within larger-scale, representative collections of books of literary fiction.
Get access

Keywords

Dutch literaturecharacter network analysismimesisdigital humanitiessocial network analysis
Type
Element
Information
Series: Elements in Digital Literary Studies
Online ISBN: 9781009180788
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 11 August 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrams, Meyer Howard. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Acocella, Joan. “What’s lost and gained in a modern ‘Little Women’.” New Yorker, February 7, 2020. www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/whats-lost-and-gained-in-a-modern-little-women.Google Scholar
Agarwal, A., Zheng, J., Kamath, S., Balasubramanian, S., and Dey, S. A.. “Key female characters in film have more to talk about besides men: Automating the Bechdel Test.” In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 830–840. Denver, CO: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2015.Google Scholar
Alberich, R., Miro-Julia, J., and Rossello, F.. “Marvel Universe looks almost like a real social network.” Elsevier Preprint, 2002. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0202174.Google Scholar
Albrecht, Milton. “Does literature reflect common values?” American Sociological Review 21, no. 6 (1956): 722–729.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Literature, Western. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Barnett, James H., and Rhoda Gruen. “Recent American divorce novels, 1938–1945: A study in the sociology of literature.” Social Forces 26, no. 3 (1948): 322–327.Google Scholar
Bel, Jacqueline, and Vaessens, Thomas, eds. Women’s Writing from the Low Countries 1880–2010: An Anthology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Berelson, B., and Salter, P.. “Majority and minority Americans: An analysis of magazine fiction.” Public Opinion Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1946): 168–190.Google Scholar
Boven, Erica Angela, Maria. Een hoofdstuk apart: “Vrouwenromans” in de literaire kritiek 1898–1930. Amsterdam: Sara/Van Gennep, 1992.Google Scholar
Brems, Hugo. Altijd weer vogels die nesten beginnen: geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1945–2005. Rotterdam: B. Bakker, 2006.Google Scholar
Briggs, X. “Ties that bind, bridge and constrain: Social capital and segregation in the American metropolis.” In Trabalho apresentado no International Seminar on Segregation and the City. Cambridge: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2001.Google Scholar
Chen, Yunsong, and Volker, Beate. “Social capital and homophily both matter for labor market outcomes: Evidence from replication and extension.” Social Networks 45 (2016): 18–31.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. “A cognitive approach to characterization: Katherina in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.” Language and Literature 9, no. 4 (2000): 291–316.Google Scholar
Curtis, Neal, and Cardo, Valentina. “Superheroes and third-wave feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 3 (2017): 381–396. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2017.1351387.Google Scholar
van der Deijl, L., Pieterse, Saskia, Prinse, Marion, and Smeets, Roel. “Mapping the demographic landscape of characters in recent Dutch prose: A quantitative approach to literary representation.” Journal of Dutch Literature 7, no. 1 (2016): 20–42.Google Scholar
Demeyer, Hans, and Vitse, Sven. Affectieve crisis, literair herstel: De romans van de millennialgeneratie. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Elson, D. K., Dames, N., and McKeown, K. R.. “Extracting social networks from literary fiction.” In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 138–147. Uppsala: 2010.Google Scholar
English, James F. “Everywhere and nowhere: The sociology of literature after ‘the sociology of literature.’” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010): v–xxiii.Google Scholar
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Freeman, Linton C. “Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification.” Social Networks 1, no. 3 (1978): 215–239.Google Scholar
Freeman, Linton C. “The development of social network analysis.” A Study in the Sociology of Science 1, no. 687 (2004): 159–167.Google Scholar
Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Fumaroli, Marc. “Houellebecq: baromètre social [Houellebecq: Social barometer].” Le Point (August 18, 2005): 63.Google Scholar
Gebauer, G. and Wulf, Christoph. Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society. Translated by Reneau, Don. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Glenn, Susan A. Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Govindan, V. K., and Shivaprasad, A. P.. “Character recognition – a review.” Pattern Recognition 23, no. 7 (1990): 671–683.Google Scholar
Granovetter, Mark S. “The strength of weak ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–1380.Google Scholar
Grayson, S., Wade, K., Meaney, G., and Greene, D.. “The sense and sensibility of different sliding windows in constructing co-occurrence networks from literature.” In Bozic, B., Mendel-Gleason, G., Debruyne, C., and O’Sullivan, D. D. (eds.), Computational History and Data-Driven Humanities. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol. 482. Cham: Springer, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46224-0_7.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Greenblatt Reader. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.Google Scholar
Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Gregory, Tobias. “Don’t break that fiddle.” London Review of Books 42, no. 22 (2020): 27.Google Scholar
Hansen, Derek L., Shneiderman, Ben, Smith, Marc A., and Hogan, B.. Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2011.Google Scholar
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.Google Scholar
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W.. “The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception.” In Karl Marx (pp. 405–424). Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.Google Scholar
Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: Norton, 2007.Google Scholar
Inglis, Ruth A. “An objective approach to the relationship between fiction and society.” American Sociological Review 3, no. 4 (1938): 526–533.Google Scholar
Jannidis, F. “Character.” In Hühn, P. et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Retrieved from www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/character.Google Scholar
Jayannavar, P., Agarwal, A., Ju, M., and Rambow, O.. “Validating literary theories using automatic social network extraction.” Proceedings of NAACL-HLT Fourth Workshop of Computational Linguistics for Literature (2015): 32–41. https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w15-0704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karsdorp, F. B., Kestemont, Mike, Schöch, Christof, and Antal, P. van den Bosch, J.. “The love equation: Computational modeling of romantic relationships in French classical drama.” 6th Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN ’15) (2015): 98–107.Google Scholar
Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the new sincerity in American fiction.” In Hering, David (ed.), Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, pp. 131–146. Austin, TX: SSMG Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Kennedy, James. Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig. Amsterdam: Boom, 1995.Google Scholar
Koolen, Corina. Reading beyond the female: The relationship between perception of author gender and literary quality. Doctoral dissertation, Amsterdam University, 2018.Google Scholar
Kraicer, E., and Piper, Andrew. “Social characters: The hierarchy of gender in contemporary English-language fiction.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 1, no. 1 (2019): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4kwrg.Google Scholar
Labatut, V. and Bost, Xavier. “Extraction and analysis of fictional character networks: A survey.” ACM Computing Surveys 52, no.5 (2019): 89. https://doi.org/10.1145/3344548.Google Scholar
Laughlin, K., Gallagher, J., Cobble, D., Boris, E., Nadasen, P., Gilmore, S., and Zarnow, L.. “Is it time to jump ship? Historians rethink the waves metaphor.” Feminist Formations 22, no. 1 (2010): 76–135. Retrieved June 22, 2021, from www.jstor.org/stable/40835345.Google Scholar
Lee, J. S., and Yeung, C. Y.. “Extracting networks of people and places from literary texts.” Proceedings of the 26th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (2012): 209–218.Google Scholar
Lee, J. S., and Wong, T. S.. “Hierarchy of characters in the Chinese Buddhist canon.” Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (2016).Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. Forms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Lynch, Teresa, Tompkins, Jessica E., van Driel, Irene I., and Fritz, Niki. “Sexy, strong, and secondary: A content analysis of female characters in video games across 31 years.” Journal of Communication 66, no. 4 (August 2016): 564–584. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12237.Google Scholar
Mann, Susan Archer, and Huffman, Douglas J.. “The decentering of second-wave feminism and the rise of the third wave.” Science and Society 69, no. 1 (2005): 56–91.Google Scholar
Marsden, P. V. “Core discussion networks of Americans.” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 122–313.Google Scholar
Marsden, P. V. “Homogeneity in confiding relations.” Social Networks 10 (1988): 57–76.Google Scholar
McEaston, M. C. 2016. https://mceaston.com/2016/01/23/the-western-literary-canon-or-the-curious-case-of-the-male-ego/.Google Scholar
Meijer, Maaike. “Feminisme als taalstrijd. Reflecties over identiteit en subjectiviteit van vrouwen.” Taal en identiteit: Afrikaans en Nederlands: voordragte gehou in die Pieterskerk, Leiden 23–24 junie 1992 onder beskerming van die Afrika Studiecentrum/byeengebr. en ingel. deur Vernon February (1994): 90–105.Google Scholar
Meijer, Maaike. Machtige melodieën: Populaire teksten uit de jaren vijftig en zestig als bron voor cultuurgeschiedenis. Inaugural lecture. Maastricht: Maastricht University, 1995.Google Scholar
Milgram, Stanley. “The small-world problem.” Psychology Today 1, no. 1 (1967): 61–67.Google Scholar
Moi, Toril. “Rethinking character.” In Moi, T., Felski, R., and Anderson, A. (eds.), Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies, pp. 27–76. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Moraru, Christian. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Moravec, M., and Chang, K. K.. “Feminist bestsellers: A digital history of 1970s feminism.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 1, no. 1 (2021): 22333.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. “Network Theory, plot analysis.” Literary Lab Pamphlet 2 (May 1, 2011). https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. “Network Theory, plot analysis”. New Left Review 68 (2011). https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii68/articles/franco-moretti-network-theory-plot-analysis.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Oltermann, Philip, “‘At first I thought, this is crazy’: The real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war.” The Guardian, June 26, 2021. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/26/project-cassandra-plan-to-use-novels-to-predict-next-war.Google Scholar
Pennell, H., and Behm-Morawitz, E.. “The empowering (super) heroine? The effects of sexualized female characters in superhero films on women.” Sex Roles 72 (2015): 211–220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-015-0455-3.Google Scholar
Petersen, Rasmus. Criminal Network Investigation: Processes, Tools, and Techniques. PhD thesis. University of Southern Denmark (2012).Google Scholar
Potolsky, Matthew. Mimesis. The New Critical Idiom. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Reicher, M. E. “The ontology of fictional character.” In Eder, J., Jannidis, F., and Schneider, R. (eds.), Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, pp.111–133. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010.Google Scholar
Righart, Hans. De eindeloze jaren zestig: Geschiedenis van een generatieconflict. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1995.Google Scholar
Schaub, Melissa. Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction: The Female Gentleman. New York: Springer, 2013.Google Scholar
Shannon, E. A. The influence of feminism on public policy abortion and equal pay in Australia and the Republic of Ireland. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tasmania, 1997.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. London: Virago Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Smeets, Roel, Sanders, E., and van den Bosch, A.. “Character centrality in present-day Dutch literary fiction.” Digital Humanities Benelux Journal 1 (2019): 71–90.Google Scholar
Smeets, Roel. Character Constellations: Representations of Social Groups in Present-Day Dutch Literary Fiction. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Stiller, J., Nettle, D., and Dunbar, R. I. M.. “The small world of Shakespeare’s plays.” Human Nature 14, no. 4 (2003): 397–408.Google Scholar
Underwood, Ted. Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Underwood, Ted, Bamman, David, and Lee, Sabrina. “The transformation of gender in English-language fiction.” Cultural Analytics (February 13, 2018). DOI:10.22148/16.019.Google Scholar
Erica, Van Boven. “De middlebrow-roman schrijft terug. Visies op elite en’hoge literatuur’in enkele publieksromans rond 1930.” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal-en Letterkunde 125, no. 3 (2011): 285–305.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Yra, and Olnon, Merlijn (2015). www.de-gids.nl/artikelen/radicaal-relationisme.Google Scholar
Volker, Beate, and Smeets, Roel. “Imagined social structures: Mirrors or alternatives? A comparison between networks of characters in contemporary Dutch literature and networks of the population in the Netherlands.” Poetics 79 (2019): 101379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vos, Leentje Cornelia. Uitzondering op de regel: De positie van vrouwelijke auteurs in het naoorlogse Nederlandse literaire veld. Doctoral dissertation, University of Groningen, 2008.Google Scholar
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying – An Observation.” In Intentions, 1891.Google Scholar

Save element to Kindle

To save this element to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Actual Fictions
  • Roel Smeets, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
  • Online ISBN: 9781009180788
Available formats
×

Save element to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Actual Fictions
  • Roel Smeets, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
  • Online ISBN: 9781009180788
Available formats
×

Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Actual Fictions
  • Roel Smeets, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
  • Online ISBN: 9781009180788
Available formats
×