Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman and the World of The Absentee

Abstract

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Extraction and Analysis of Fictional Character Networks

“…Srivastava et al use co-occurrences, affiliations, and direct actions, and they also consider how similarly characters are described in the text [229]. When studying Edgeworth's The Absentee, Falk et al detect not only oral conversations, but also written ones [75], which belong to the class of direct actions in our nomenclature. He et al use two distinct definitions, but in conjunction rather than disjunction: they use affiliations only if expressed in conversations [102].…”

“…This can be due to several reasons. The first is that some groups of people are mentioned in an indistinguishable way in the raw material, for instance: townfolks in Twain's Huckleberry Finn [126], Olympian gods and Greek soldiers in Homer's Iliad [259], bypassers in certain plays [137,172] and novels [75]. Second, it can also be that some characters always appear simultaneously in the plot: considering them collectively can be viewed as some form of simplification.…”

“…This is related to the notion of articulation point: a vertex whose removal makes the graph disconnected. Several authors adopt this approach: Moretti [170] to study Shakespeare's Hamlet, Falk [75] for Edgeworth's The absentee, and Mac Carron & Kenna [154,155] for mythological works. Moretti removes various combinations of the most central vertices in terms of degree or closeness, in order to study which ones split the…”

“…However, when considering networks focusing on chapters, this idea is questioned as poorer character hold a more important role (the main character still being the richest, though). Falk [75] studies the Bildungsroman, a category of novels dealing with the formative years of young characters. In the domain of literary analysis, some authors oppose two subclasses: domestic vs. network novels.…”

“…Authors use them in a "distant reading" fashion to obtain a simplification of the plot [170], characterize the plot structure at various levels [209], detect relevant patterns and narrative events, identify character roles (e.g. protagonist vs. antagonist) or particularly important characters [208], assess the validity of literary theories [71,75], and produce graphical representations [185,259,272]. In addition to the description of individual plots, they are also used to compare them, for example among episodes of a given series [97], or works belonging to the same genre [209], period [115] or author [200].…”