Speech Distribution in Five-Act Tragedies (A Question of Classicism and Romanticism)

Yarkho, Boris I.

doi:10.1515/jlt-2019-0002

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…However, close reading produces only anecdotal evidence -suitable for conducting nuanced case studies, but not for testing large-picture theories. And so, even the early scholars of literary evolution acknowledged the importance of moving beyond the anecdotal -towards quantitative research (Hankiss, 1972;Lotman, 1967;Yarkho, 2019).…”

Section: Books and Films As Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of Modern Literature and Film

Sobchuk

2023

The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution

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The evolution of complex narratives, such as fictional books or films, is a fairly new area of cultural-evolutionary research. It gained momentum only recently, when researchers got access to large datasets of literature, movies, and other kinds of storytelling, allowing us to discover long-lasting historical trends and regularities. This chapter, first, discusses a theoretical question: in what sense do narratives evolve? More precisely, it focuses not on the transmission of stories themselves, but on the evolution of narrative forms, or techniques of storytelling. Then, the chapter proceeds to describing how content-based, or hedonic, selection influences the evolution of narrative forms—and briefly, the role of several other evolutionary mechanisms, such as drift and accumulation of innovations. Finally, the chapter schematically presents the methods used for studying the evolution of literature and film at a large scale: from manual coding to text mining and other computational techniques.

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Section: Books and Films As Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of Modern Literature and Film

Sobchuk

2023

The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution

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“…This picture is puzzling because it suggests continuity and slow global processes in traditions that scholars have often perceived as volatile fields of innovation, competition and constant conflict of elites [ 9 , 10 ]. The contrary evidence for a punctuated equilibrium pattern of cultural evolution [ 11 ] or a cyclical turn-around of styles [ 12 – 14 ] is also abundant, but a question remains: Are we underestimating the continuity and conservative forces at work in cultural traditions associated with creative freedom? This study asks this question about a practice which tends to be imagined as extremely individualistic: the composition of poetry.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics of European poetry is shaped by conservative forces: The relationship between poetic meter and meaning in accentual-syllabic verse

2022

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Recent advances in cultural analytics and large-scale computational studies of art, literature and film often show that long-term change in the features of artistic works happens gradually. These findings suggest that conservative forces that shape creative domains might be underestimated. To this end, we provide the first large-scale formal evidence of the association between poetic meter and semantics in 18-19th century European literatures, using Czech, German and Russian collections with additional data from English poetry and early modern Dutch songs. Our study traces this association through a series of unsupervised classifications using the abstracted semantic features of poems that are inferred for individual texts with the aid of topic modeling. Topics alone enable recognition of the meters in each observed language, as may be seen from the same-meter samples clustering together (median Adjusted Rand Index between 0.48 and 1 across traditions). In addition, this study shows that the strength of the association between form and meaning tends to decrease over time. This may reflect a shift in aesthetic conventions between the 18th and 19th centuries as individual innovation was increasingly favored in literature. Despite this decline, it remains possible to recognize semantics of the meters from past or future, which suggests the continuity in meter-meaning relationships while also revealing the historical variability of conditions across languages. This paper argues that distinct metrical forms, which are often copied in a language over centuries, also maintain long-term semantic inertia in poetry. Our findings highlight the role of the formal features of cultural items in influencing the pace and shape of cultural evolution.

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“…Such work has never been done before; the only name I can think of is Boris Yarkho, who divided the history of European tragedy into periods and determined the boundaries between them, using quantitative features. (Yarkho 2019(Yarkho [1938). Lovers and villains in early Elizabethan tragedies compared to their Baroque and post-Restoration counterparts in tragedies and tragi-comedies are quite dissimilar.…”

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confidence: 99%

Evolution of Verse Form, Plots and Characters in English Plays (mid-16th to mid-19th centuries)

Tarlinskaja

2019

SMP

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The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how the rhythmical evolution of English dramatic iambic pentameter parallelled the changes of aesthetic tastes and social values of English society from the mid-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth century. During 250 years the evolution of such features as the abundance or absence of enjambments, the use of constrained or loose iambs, and some others corresponds to the changes in the architecture of the theaters, the social structure of the audience, the manners of declamation, the complexity of poetic language, and the types of characters and plots the playwrights used.

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Speech Distribution in Five-Act Tragedies (A Question of Classicism and Romanticism)

Cited by 6 publications

References 3 publications

Evolution of Modern Literature and Film

Evolution of Modern Literature and Film

Semantics of European poetry is shaped by conservative forces: The relationship between poetic meter and meaning in accentual-syllabic verse

Evolution of Verse Form, Plots and Characters in English Plays (mid-16th to mid-19th centuries)

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