Little-Known Page of Co-Creation of Ch. Dickens and W. Collins: Novel “No Exit”

The article is devoted to comprehending the creative cooperation of the outstanding Victorians Ch. Dickens and W. Collins, who were co-authors for a decade and a half, as well as to the study of the peculiarities of the novel “No Exit”, which was not republished in Russia from the end of the 19th century until 2021 and was virtually unknown to the Russian-speaking reader. The relevance of the article is due to the need to build a coherent and consistent history of the development of English literature of the Victorian epoch in the domestic literary consciousness, an important part of which is the legacy of its masters, as well as the elimination of gaps in the creative biography of the largest figures of Victorianism. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian English studies a gap in the reception of the creative tandem of Ch. Dickens and W. Collins has been filled: the key studies of their heritage have been comprehended; the history of their creative union has been studied; the novel “No Exit” in the context of the creative biography of Ch. Dickens and W. Collins was analyzed; the features of the generic (interweaving of epic and dramatic elements) and genre synthesis (combination of gothic, detective, adventure beginning) of the novel are revealed. The authors of the article used comparative historical, biographical, sociocultural methods, as well as the method of holistic analysis of a work of art

Problem of Periodization and Some Aspects of the Late Work of F. Bret Hart

The article is devoted to the discussion of the problem of periodization and the study of the features of the late stage of the work of the outstanding American prose writer Francis Bret Hart (1836—1902). The relevance of the article is due to the need to build a coherent and consistent history of the development of American literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, an important part of which is the writer’s prose heritage. The authors comprehend Western (J. Stewart, G. Scharnhorst, A. Nissen and others) and domestic (A. V. Vaschenko, L. P. Grossman, P. E. Schegolev, A. I. Startsev, V. A. Libman, E. Yu. Rogonova, A. B. Tanaseichuk) studies on biography and various aspects of the prose writer. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in American studies a gap in the reception of F. Bret Hart's work was filled (the absence of clear criteria for periodization); the tradition of a disdainful attitude to the European period of his work, established in American literary criticism, is refuted, in particular, it is proved that in the stories and novels of the 1880s and 1890s Bret Hart boldly goes beyond the usual themes and images: the “Californian theme”, traditional for his early prose, takes on a new dimension — in the aspect of understanding national and gender psychology (“Maruga”); amorous and melodramatic collisions are combined with an appeal to science fiction (“The Secret of the Hacienda”)

Separating metagenomic short reads into genomes via clustering

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The metagenomics approach allows the simultaneous sequencing of all genomes in an environmental sample. This results in high complexity datasets, where in addition to repeats and sequencing errors, the number of genomes and their abundance ratios are unknown. Recently developed next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies significantly improve the sequencing efficiency and cost. On the other hand, they result in shorter reads, which makes the separation of reads from different species harder. Among the existing computational tools for metagenomic analysis, there are similarity-based methods that use reference databases to align reads and composition-based methods that use composition patterns (<it>i.e.</it>, frequencies of short words or <it>l</it>-mers) to cluster reads. Similarity-based methods are unable to classify reads from unknown species without close references (which constitute the majority of reads). Since composition patterns are preserved only in significantly large fragments, composition-based tools cannot be used for very short reads, which becomes a significant limitation with the development of NGS. A recently proposed algorithm, AbundanceBin, introduced another method that bins reads based on predicted abundances of the genomes sequenced. However, it does not separate reads from genomes of similar abundance levels.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this work, we present a two-phase heuristic algorithm for separating short paired-end reads from different genomes in a metagenomic dataset. We use the observation that most of the <it>l</it>-mers belong to unique genomes when <it>l</it> is sufficiently large. The first phase of the algorithm results in clusters of <it>l</it>-mers each of which belongs to one genome. During the second phase, clusters are merged based on <it>l</it>-mer repeat information. These final clusters are used to assign reads. The algorithm could handle very short reads and sequencing errors. It is initially designed for genomes with similar abundance levels and then extended to handle arbitrary abundance ratios. The software can be download for free at <url>http://www.cs.ucr.edu/∼tanaseio/toss.htm</url>.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our tests on a large number of simulated metagenomic datasets concerning species at various phylogenetic distances demonstrate that genomes can be separated if the number of common repeats is smaller than the number of genome-specific repeats. For such genomes, our method can separate NGS reads with a high precision and sensitivity.</p