Corpus and Literary Criticism : An Analysis of Tess of the d'Urbervilles Using Concordancers

摘要

Close reading is considered important in the criticism of English literature; however, in analyzing novels researchers should make a precise memo to record how and where certain words are used in the work. If we could use both corpus made up from electronic texts on the internet and a concordancer, it would make the above efforts much easier. In this essay Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles was examined by using three tools of WordSmith, a concordance software, in comparison with George Eliot's Middlemarch and Sommerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. WordSmith is a set of programs, which has three main tools called Wordlist, Keywords, and Concord. Wordlist as a tool makes a list of all the words in a text, set out in frequency order. With Keywords, the key words can be observed by comparing its wordlist with that of other reference text(s). Concord, a concordancer, can be used to plot any keyword or phrase in context to check what sort of wording it accompanies. With these tools we could get a lot of linguistic information about the text, which leads us deeper understanding of the novel. Especially, Concord gives useful information on wording about keywords of a novel. How to select keywords is up to each researcher; however, concordance lines can help us to gain a clear view about a theme. In this way a concordancer is a useful tool for literary criticism.