Schouder aan schouder. Over de droom van Ysabele in de Roman van Walewein

The Dutch Arthurian romance Walewein contains an intriguing dream passage in which the character Ysabele describes a handsome knight with on his shoulders the image of a maiden, wearing a coat of armor made from the hide of a lion and wielding in his hand a fire-breathing serpent. This article offers a theoretical explanation for the origin of these elements and their possible connection to the theme of kingship in the romance, suggesting the imagery was possibly inspired by the description of King Arthur in the Latin chronicle Historia Brittonum

Structure over style: collaborative authorship and the revival of literary capitalism

James Patterson is the world’s best-selling living author, but his approach to writing is heavily criticised for being too commercially driven — in many respects, he is considered the master of the airport novel, a highly-productive source of commuter fiction. A former marketing professional, Patterson uses his business acumen to drive sales of his novels, which are largely written in conjunction with lesser-known co-authors. Using stylometry, this paper analyses the extent to which Patterson actually contributes to the writing of his novels, situating his process within the context of literary capitalism and the novel as a force of modernity

The translator’s wife’s traces : Alma Cardell Curtin and Jeremiah Curtin

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was Alma who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This paper investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations as well.

The thickness of time : the writing of history and appropriation of the past in Brazil, 1830–1930

The recent Brazilian history of historiography perceives the period from 1830 to 1930 as a decisive one for the development of Brazilian historiography, be it for the definition of the disciplinary protocols that frame the historian’s work or for the emergence of problems concerning the disputes over and elaboration of a national identity. The importance of this century has already been established in works on the role of national institutions, such as the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute (IHGB) and the National Museum, and in works on the discursive dimensions of historiographical practice. Thus, a new way to consider the experience of time has been proposed, resulting in a thoughtful understanding of the history of historiography and its field. Therefore, this article aims to offer an overview of the different modulations of temporal experience that appear in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazilian historiography, presenting some of the topoi that have organised and shaped it

Structure over Style: Collaborative Authorship and the Revival of Literary Capitalism

James Patterson is the world’s best-selling living author, but his approach to writing is heavily criticised for being too commercially driven — in many respects, he is considered the master of the airport novel, a highly-productive source of commuter fiction. A former marketing professional, Patterson uses his business acumen to drive sales of his novels, which are largely written in conjunction with lesser-known co-authors. Using stylometry, this paper analyses the extent to which Patterson actually contributes to the writing of his novels, situating his process within the context of literary capitalism and the novel as a force of modernity

Stylometryczna niewidzialność tłumacza

Translator’s Stylometric InvisibilityIn a corpus of the writings of several authors, each author being represented by several texts, it is usually enough to compare the similarities between the frequencies of some 100 most frequent words (obviously, these usually include various function words rather than content words) in these texts to group the texts correctly by the authors. This paper investigates the phenomenon that translated texts also tend to be grouped by the original author rather than by the translator despite the fact that the most frequent words in a corpus of translations in no way maintain a one-to-one relationship with those in the original corpus. This is illustrated with examples of experiments performed on a variety of parallel sets of literary texts in English, French and Polish

Translator's stylometric invisibility

In a corpus of the writings of several authors, each author being represented by several texts, it is usually enough to compare the similarities between frequencies of some 100 most frequent words (obviously, these usually include various function words rather than content words) in these texts to group the texts correctly by the authors. This paper investigates the phenomenon that translated texts also tend to be grouped by the original author rather than by the translator despite the fact that the most frequent words in a corpus of translations in no way maintain a one-to-one relationship with those in the original corpus. This is illustrated with examples of experiments performed on a variety of parallel sets of literary text in English, French and Polish

Corneille, Molière et les autres. Stilometrische Analysen zu Autorschaft und Gattungszugehörigkeit im französischen Theater der Klassik

The digital age, by making large amounts of text available to us, prompts us to develop new and additional reading strategies supported by the use of computers and enabling us to deal with such amounts of text. One such "distant reading" strategy is stylometry, a method of quantitative text analysis which relies on the frequencies of certain linguistic features such as words, letters or grammatical units to statistically assess the relative similarity of texts to each other and to classify texts on this basis. This method is applied here to French drama of the seventeenth century, more precisely to the now famous "Corneille / Molière- controversy". In this controversy, some researchers claim that Pierre Corneille wrote several of the plays traditionally attributed to Molière. The methodological challenge, it is shown here, lies in the fact that categories such as authorship, genre (comedy vs. tragedy) and literary form (prose vs. verse) all have an influence on stylometric distance measures and classification. Cross-genre and cross-form authorship attribution needs to distinguish such competing signals if it is to produce reliable attribution results. This contribution describes two attempts to accomplish this, parameter optimization and feature-range selection. The contribution concludes with some more general remarks about the use of quantitative methods in a hermeneutic discipline such as literary studies

The Translator’s Wife’s traces. Alma Cardell Curtin and Jeremiah Curtin

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was Alma who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This paper investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations as well