Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Aspects of Character: Quantitative Evidence and Fictional People
Abstract
“Aspects of Character” uses quantitative evidence to trace new timelines in the literary history of characterization. The guiding premise of this work is that digital libraries and mathematical perspectives can shed new light on the practices used to configure fictional people. Using texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this dissertation analyzes how different aspects of characters have transformed throughout history, coordinating quantitative experiments with the critical perspectives of literary scholars. This project begins by analyzing the characterization used in works of fiction that were reviewed by prestigious publications. This first experiment pushes back on a historical truism about “well-crafted” characters, investigating the degree that characters in prestigious works are distinguishable for their complex inner stories. The dissertation then turns its attention to the more social aspects of characters, analyzing the gendering of physical characterization. This experiment explores the gendered distributions of body language, providing new historical insight into debates about gender, sexuality, and body studies. The third experiment addresses a concern about quantitative methods. This last bit of research more closely attends to a subset of the analysis produced in the second experiment, examining the gendering of characters hand gestures. Literary critics have often discussed the gendered representation of characters moving through space, and this chapter shows how quantitative methods can aid these more precise observations. Throughout, I coordinate literary theories about the past with quantitative evidence, unpacking their reciprocal implications.
Subject Area
Literature|History|Gender studies
Recommended Citation
Cheng, Jonathan Yu, "Aspects of Character: Quantitative Evidence and Fictional People" (2020). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI28022055.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI28022055