Comparative Analysis of Writing Styles in the Story of the Stone based on Character Networks

摘要

Comparison of writing styles in the fiction The Story of the Stone has been a controversial topic in redology. In this paper, the literary network is considered as a social network. We aim to figure out this question based on the analysis of evolving networks extracted on three levels. The three network construction methods including chap-leveltchapters), para-level(paragraphs) and sent-level(sentences) are all based on the idea of co-occurrence. Furthermore, the analysis of community structure evolution is also implemented on these three levels. The results validated by empirical knowledge show that the proposed analysis framework is applicable in interpreting and revealing the contents of the fiction.