Code supporting the analysis in Romanticism and the Contingent Self. The main functionality is packaged up in the romanticself Python package. Jupyter Notebooks in the home directory show how I generated the tables and figures for each chapter.
This book offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature. In the past, Romanticism has been seen as an individualistic movement, with writers believing in the ‘centrality’ of the self. Challenging this prevailing view of Romanticism and the modern self, this study unveils an alternative tradition of Romantic writing in which the self is fragile, degenerate, non-existent – or in a word, contingent. It combines philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies and digital humanities and takes a transnational approach both in its coverage of philosophical thought and literature, including case studies from England, Ireland, Scotland and colonial Australia, with examples from American and European works as well. The book also uses innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis to enrich the exploration of text and context. It covers all major genres of Romantic writing: fiction (realist novels), poetry (the sonnet), non-fiction prose (biography) and drama (gothic tragedy). Providing a new framework for understanding the contingent self, this book is of interest to scholars and students of Romantic literature, philosophy of the self and digital humanities.
The code in this repository is not entirely reproducible, because some of the data is copyright protected an cannot be published here. However, the actual scripts should run on any machine with Python 3 installed, so long as you install the dependencies:
pip3 install nltk
pip3 install bs4
The repository is divided into four main parts:
- data: The data directory. Only some of the data can be posted here for copyright reasons. (See below.)
- figures: Rendered versions of figures used in the book
- romanticself: A Python package bundling the classes used to ingest data for the analysis
- scripts: Some scripts used to run larger analyses on remote machines
In the main directory, you will find one Jupyter Notebook for each chapter of the book. Each notebook displays how I applied the code in the repo to produce the analysis in the corresponding chapter. As mentioned above, this analysis will not be fully reproducible on your machine due to copyright issues in the data.
- Chapter 1: Analysis of the JSTOR Corpus to establish how 'selfhood' is discussed in contemporary Romantic scholarship
- Chapter 2 does not include any digital analysis.
- Chapter 3: Analysis of the novel corpus to explore the portrayal of self in the Bildungsroman and the 'network novel'
- Chapter 4: Analysis of the sonnet corpus to explore how genre, narrative and deixis contribute to the portrayal of self in Romantic lyric poetry
- Chapter 5: Network analysis of two drama corpora to establish how characterisation and setting work together to undo the self in Romantic tragedy
- Chapter 6: Sentiment analysis of the biography corpus to explore how Thomas Moore and other Romantic biographers construct the selfhood of their subject
The code is licensed under the MIT license in the [LICENSE] file.
Some files in data have other licences. If the licence is 'Gutenberg', then the text of the licence is included in the file. The CC0 licence means the file is in the public domain.
In the Novel corpus
In addition to the listed files, the analysis in Romanticism and the Contingent Self uses the text of five novels that are in copyright.
- charlotte-temple.txt: Gutenberg
- the-coquette.txt: Gutenberg
- hobomok.txt: CC BY-SA 3.0
- arthur-mervyn.txt: Gutenberg
- last-of-the-mohicans.txt: Gutenberg
- banished-man.txt: CC BY-SA 3.0
- old-manor-house.txt: CC BY-SA 3.0
- evelina.txt: Gutenberg
- camilla.txt: Gutenberg
- the-recess.txt: CC0
- maria.txt: Gutenberg
- julia.txt: CC0
- simple-story.txt: Gutenberg
- caleb-williams.txt: Gutenberg
- anna-st-ives.txt: Gutenberg
- henry.txt: CC0
- emma-courtney.txt: Gutenberg
- belinda.txt: Gutenberg
- adeline-mowbray.txt: Gutenberg
- wild-irish-girl.txt: Gutenberg
- emma.txt: Gutenberg
- persuasion.txt: Gutenberg
- self-control.txt: Gutenberg
- vivian.txt: Gutenberg
- heroine.txt: Gutenberg
- waverley.txt: Gutenberg
- ivanhoe.txt: Gutenberg
- marriage.txt: Gutenberg
- annals-of-the-parish.txt: Gutenberg
- udolpho.txt: Gutenberg
- melmoth.txt: Gutenberg
- monk.txt: Gutenberg
- frankenstein.txt: Gutenberg
- cottagers-of-glenburnie.txt: CC BY-SA 3.0
- justified-sinner.txt: Gutenberg
In the Biography corpus
- galt.xml: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0
- lockhart.xml: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0
- medwin.xml: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0
- moore.xml: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0
- gaskell-1.txt: Gutenberg
- gaskell-2.txt: Gutenberg
- southey.txt: Gutenberg
Unfortunately the entire sonnet corpus is in copyright, and cannot be shared in this repository.
In the Drama corpus
This corpus only contains facts about the network structure of the plays, and is not subject to copyright.