'So soft, so sweet, so delicately clear.' A Computer-assisted Analysis of Accumulated Words and Phrases in Lord Byron's Epic Poem Don Juan
T. Rommel · Literary and Linguistic Computing · 1994
This paper investigates computer-assisted methods for preparing and interpreting literary texts. An analysis of word clusters in Lord Byron's Don Juan proves particularly rewarding as the poem is dominated by this stylistic device. Predefined patterns of conjunction and/or punctuation in combination with a fixed number of words between them provide the basis for this approach, using TUSTEP to identify, locate and extract word clusters including their context. The passages meeting the search criteria are later verified and interpreted in respect of their function in their immediate context or the whole of the text This analysis describes systematic procedures for filtering and tagging a stylistic device that plays a central role in the structural setup of the poem.