A corpus-based approach to Charles Dickens's use of direct thought presentation

Reviewed by: The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration, and: Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: the Brutal Tongue Roger Luckhurst (bio) Piya Pal-Lapinski , The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), xx + 156 pages, paperback, $24.95 (ISBN 1 58465 429 5). Christine Ferguson , Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: the Brutal Tongue (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) x + 192 pages,hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 7546 5082 0). Both volumes, although from very different areas of cultural inquiry and method, attempt to describe the flickering ambiguity of a marginal figure in Victorian society. Pal-Lapinski examines the odalisque, the exotic woman, a being without racial or geographic fixity, who flits through Southern Europe, Arabia and India unnerving colonial commentary wherever she appears. Ferguson focuses on the articulate brute or savage, another shifting marker with distinctly contradictory roles in Victorian philology, anthropology, biology and the late Victorian romance. Both critics also tend to regard popular forms as the primary vehicle for the cultural articulation of their ambiguous figures. Otherness is therefore redoubled: marginal figures in marginal texts. Pal-Lapinski's slim but dense volume owes much of its theoretical armature to post-colonial criticism. The exotic woman, the woman of the harem or zenana, was the locus of repulsion/attraction in travel narratives, paintings and novels. Due to the different patterns of colonial engagement, the French tended to be obsessed with the Arabian or North African figure, the English with the women of the Indian sub-continent. In fact, she convincingly suggests we should extend this feminine trope into Europe (the exoticism of the Southern Italian or Spanish woman) and also use it to read the dense and contradictory [End Page 142] investments of French and English writers in Egypt: 'the exotic female body has always been inscribed by a kind of métissage, a racial elusiveness' (xv). Pal-Lapinski suggests that much criticism has regarded the figure of the odalisque as a figure of oppression or domination.In what is now a familiar move, suitably deferential to Edward Said's foundational Orientalism but seeking to move beyond it, the book proposes a refinement that suggests that nineteenth-century discourses of exoticism 'produce the body of the odalisque via a dissident textuality that resists closure and implodes the imperatives of ethnography, threatening the coherence of "whiteness" as a racial category' (xvi). The exotic woman may well be the mark of racial subjugation, but also of defiance, evasion or subversion, and these disturbances can be traced in colonial texts. In her opening contextual chapter, Pal-Lapinski usefully situates the interplay of travel narratives (Julia Pardoe's Cityof the Sultan), painting (Ingres' Turkish Bath or Frederick Lewis' The Hareem), sensational colonial exposés (Taylor's Confessions of a Thug) and Gothic novels (Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or the Moor) in the production of the figure of the exotic woman. Chapter two explores the fearful figure of the female poisoner in Wilkie Collins' Armadale and Legacy of Cain. Chapter three looks at exotic woman as vector of disease in colonial settings, moving beyond familiar discussions about the racializing of successive epidemics of Asiatic cholera to consider the Anglo-Indian novels of Flora Steel. Chapter four unearths the medical concerns about the effect of the tropics on the reproductive capacities of white settler women, linking the fear of 'tropical ovaries' or 'deranged menstruation' with the fevered fantasy of Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm. Chapter five also works hard to link together the Orientalized jewellery of René Lalique (worn by Sarah Bernhardt and associated not just with daring actresses but also the exoticized demi-monde of bejewelled courtesans) and Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars. Here the female mummy's infiltration of a strapping young English lass is a 'hybrid vampire odalisque-queen that not only signified the fragility of narratives of progress but also transforms imperial history into nightmare' (107). The book ends with a chapter on the figure of the Italian opera diva, looking at the supernatural fictions of Bulwer-Lytton...

Ethnography in Fiction<i>Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth‐Century British Novels</i>. By James Buzard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 320 pp.<i>Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920</i>. By Brad Evans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 244 pp.

This thesis was scanned from the print manuscript for digital preservation and is copyright the author. Researchers can access this thesis by asking their local university, institution or public library to make a request on their behalf. Monash staff and postgraduate students can use the link in the References field.

An Englishwoman's Workhouse is Her Castle:Poor Management and Gothic Fiction in the 1790s Scott R. Mackenzie The young unmarried woman in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction may be the most overdetermined character in all of English literature. She is always surrounded by a throng of themes, contests, anxieties, polemics, and proprieties. She has been asked, and often coerced, to represent domestic harmony, the aspiring middle class, patriotic sentiment, reproductive sexuality, and the community of taste and decency. Among her responsibilities are paternity, legitimacy, property, social relations, and the maintenance or overthrow of aristocratic privilege. She is endangered and dangerous, innocent and guilty, prudent and wasteful, modest and brazen. Her admirers call her proto-feminist, exogamous, and duplicitous, and her detractors charge her with the same. The young single woman is in fact double, or indeed multiple. She is, as recent critics have thoroughly established, a privileged locus for the identification and examination of collective anxieties. My purpose here is to add yet another determinant to the list that already encumbers our heroine. She is also very frequently the focus of anxiety about the poor. Debates about poverty acquire sufficient cultural prominence in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century to inflect most prose fiction of the period, and, most often, it is the young unmarried woman who carries the burden of figuration. She embodies the vulnerabilities of the poor and the dangers they pose, and from her fortunes we may generally derive ideological formations relevant to matters of poor management. Of course the relationship between poverty debates and fiction does not work in one direction only. The vogue for sentiment provided vocabulary and attitudes for talking about the poor. Indeed, sentimentalism arguably began as a mode of talking about (and sometimes to) the poor. The bleeding of sentimental language into political discourse is especially notable around the turn of the century, when philanthropic benevolence became more and more institutional and national and advocates of the poor formed alliances with evangelical activists such as [End Page 681] Hannah More and the abolitionist William Wilberforce. Sir Egerton Brydges, MP for Maidstone, writes in 1813, "Never before did I meet with a subject in which the driest details of business were associated with all the best furniture of a poetic mind; where the blaze of fancy, and the best emotions of the heart could throw the truest, the most philosophical, and most virtuous light on a complicated subject of artificial legislation."1 As prominent traffickers in sentimental language, novelists could hardly avoid comparing the attributes and experiences of unmarried women with those of the poor. When we compare representations of single women and paupers we will find striking similarities in the kinds of condemnation or sympathy, bitter or happy endings they receive. At the same time, radical and anti-sentimental writers like Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld contested the terminology proposed by sentimental authors but affirmed the urgency of the poverty debates. The French Revolution, the decay of parish governance, and the wage and food-price crises of the 1790s and 1800s forced most, if not all, representations of British nationality to reckon with the underclasses. Gothic fiction of the 1790s, I will argue, is especially dense with rhetorical and thematic echoes of the poor debates, and the reverse is certainly also true. My exemplary text is Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, a work published in 1791. Radcliffe's work anticipated, and undoubtedly influenced, a remarkable portion of the topoi and attitudes that came to dominate poor-law discourse until around 1815. Her novels, and the gothic fiction of her era generally, are deeply involved not only with digesting fears about what was happening in France but also with sustaining a much longer cultural conversation about the poor in England. If sentimental fiction codified personal affective responses to individual examples of poverty and suffering, the first major wave of gothic fiction deals in personal and political encounters with collective bodies of the poor—figuring contests over regulation and discipline of the poor as battles between private subjects and mysterious, implacable mechanisms of coercion. Following Radcliffe's lead, both novelists and poor-law advocates...

Book Review| July 01 2013 Rev. of Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Rae Greiner Rae Greiner. Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 2012. x+203pp. $60 (c). Tanya Agathocleous Tanya Agathocleous Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Victorians Institute Journal (2013) 41: 226–228. https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.41.1.0226 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Tanya Agathocleous; Rev. of Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Rae Greiner. Victorians Institute Journal 1 July 2013; 41 226–228. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.41.1.0226 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressVictorians Institute Journal Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2013 by The Pennsylvania State University2013The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Patrick Brantlinger English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Heidi Kaufman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 243 pp. $85.00. Heidi Kaufman has written a useful and consistently interesting book. She examines many of the complex ways that "Jewish discourse" is imbricated in nineteenth-century British fiction and culture. In doing so, she critiques Edward Said's Orientalism for its overly binaristic approach to Western depictions of the East. Christianity, after all, emerged from "the Holy Land" and ancient Jewish sources. Kaufman recognizes that Victorian novels are palimpsests, and that one of their underlying texts—more often than not the [End Page 192] principal one—is the Bible (p. 94). Jews also occupied an influential albeit liminal place in 1800s Britain. Among the novels that Kaufman analyzes is Tancred; or, the New Crusade (1847) by future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, hardly a minor figure in nineteenth-century British and, indeed, global history (pp. 82-92). Kaufman begins by analyzing Britain as a "nested nation" (pp. 1-26), meaning that it was never purely "English" but contained a mix of peoples, cultures, and religions, including, from the Middle Ages on, Jews and Judaism. Just as the Bible contains both Old and New Testaments, moreover, so Anglicanism contains and supposedly goes beyond Roman Catholicism, while all versions of Christianity are obviously indebted to Judaism. As Kaufman demonstrates, this indebtedness is acknowledged in a variety of ways in many Victorian novels, even when they express antisemitism. In her second chapter, she examines the depictions of the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. Both authors simultaneously express and struggle to overcome antisemitism. Harrington was Edgeworth's self-conscious albeit ambivalent attempt to deal with the antisemitism she had been criticized for in some of her earlier work. And in treating the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, Dickens invokes the story of Abraham and Isaac and shows both Gordon and Gashford fantasizing about becoming Jews. Gordon actually did convert to Judaism. "In the upside down world of the riots," Kaufman notes, "Gordon, the president of the Protestant Association, becomes a Jew while Jewish homes are marked as belonging to a 'True Protestant'" (p. 55) to escape the violence of the rioters. Chapter Three shows how Judah's Lion, an 1843 novel by evangelical Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, deals with a return to the Holy Land in a way comparable to the "new crusade" of Disraeli's aristocratic Young England hero, Tancred. Tonna's Anglo-Jewish protagonist Alick Cohen "watches British flags hoisted over Middle Eastern territories" (p. 60) and is proud to be both Jewish and British. Judah's lion, which Richard I supposedly added "to the English national flag on the occasion of its conquest over Jerusalem during the Third Crusade" (p. 60), symbolizes the historic and religious unity of England and Palestine, with British imperial expansion into the Middle East as the parallel to Alick's conversion to Christianity. Like other Victorian authors, however, Tonna runs into the difficulty that Jewishness had come to be understood as racial, and not just as cultural and religious: Alick converts, but biologically he will forever be Jewish—a stumbling block for those who considered the white, Anglo-Saxon race superior to all other races. In Tancred, Kaufman goes on to claim, "Christian culture is not defined against a Jewish other but as a product of Jewish origins" (p. 83). Disraeli was [End Page 193] less interested than Tonna in religion, however, and more interested in race, and particularly in reversing the standard racial polarities. Kaufman believes that Tancred meets his match in the Jewish Eva, and that her Judaism trumps or at least complements his Christianity, which is partially true. But she overlooks Tancred's friendship with the Young Syrian Fakredeen and also Tancred's encounter with "the Angel of Arabia" on Mt. Sinai, who tells him that "Arabian" or Semitic peoples have produced all of the world's great empires and religions. Fakredeen and the Angel add Islam to Tancred's melting pot, and Disraeli's term "Arabian" is more...

This study compared medical texts written by journal authors with texts written by student authors in order to see what could be learned that would be useful for EMP (English for medical purposes) pedagogy. Using corpus linguistics, the researchers undertook a micro-level comparison of verb choices. The current study began with the corpora compilation of two collections of medical texts-one containing 50 admission notes composed by Taiwanese medical students and the other containing 50 medical case reports written by journal authors. Despite differences in purposes and audience, both collections contain similar contents: medical histories, diagnoses, and information on testing and treatment. For the micro-level verb usage comparison, tools such as WordSmith and TreeTagger were utilized to determine frequency and concordance in order to identify verbs commonly used by students and those frequently employed by experts. Of the WordSmith Tools, specific functions such as wordlist, keywords, and concord functions were employed. The results highlight implications for EAP pedagogy in general and EMP pedagogy in particular. Students can learn from journal writers by expanding their use of verb choices, by making their writing style more objective, and by documenting more details to make their writing more informative.

The aim of this research is to analyze the presence of terminological variants in the specialty language of coffee and to verify the possibility of building a bilingual vocabulary based on spoken language. The study is guided by the consecutive or liaison interpreting and the use of spoken corpora, once we can establish a close relation between spoken language and interpreting, oral mode of translation. Several difficulties were faced in order to build the spoken corpora, and they are presented with some suggestions for future research. The principles of Corpus Linguistics are followed to the corpora design, as well corpora exploration, using Mike Scott's WordSmith Tools. The study is significant due to the knowledge of terminological variants in spoken language, by interpreters and professional workers at a specialty area, and also to the possibilities Corpus Linguistics offers to a socioterminological research at spoken variety. Two monolingual spoken corpora were compiled, one in Brazilian Portuguese and the other in English spoken world-wide. The main topic is Coffee, divided in harvest and processing, with face to face interviews as well as conversations among coffee professionals, in both languages. An interpreting corpus is also included in the work, between Portuguese and English speakers. After analysis, we present a bilingual vocabulary of spoken language, including the variants found for most of the terms.

Undeservedly neglected, Frances Trollope's anti-slavery fiction contributes significantly to the discourse on abolition and race in the 1830s and '40s. The Barnabys in America; or Adventures of the Widow Wedded (1843) reveals the anxieties surrounding these subjects, interweaving its comedy with an indictment of slavery that many US readers would have considered threatening rather than amusing. Trollope not only includes a successful slave revolt, a subject scrupulously avoided in most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and US fiction, but presents this violence as the novel comes to a comic close. The Barnabys suggests that, while slave rebellion seems anomalous within comic conventions, it is also an ironic inevitability in a society where slavery uneasily co-exists with a rhetoric of freedom.

When George Du Maurier?s infamous mesmerist Svengali performs on his elastic penny whistle, the instrument produces a sound ?more human almost than the human voice itself.? The suggestion that a voice could be more, or conversely less, human calls attention to the precariousness of a category under threat in the nineteenth century. My project confronts the enigmatic nature of voices in transatlantic Gothic fiction in relation to definitions of the human, attending to figures that frustrate taxonomic classification in sonic as well as visual terms. Discussions of stethoscopic listening, physiognomy, vivisection, and mesmerism in Britain and the United States frame my chapters, underscoring a nineteenth-century preoccupation with embodiment foundational for both literary and medical knowledge. Through an analysis of bodies as soundscapes in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H.G. Wells, among others, my project discovers an attention to voice as a recalcitrant force that subverts scientific authority over bodies. Michel Foucault?s The Birth of the Clinic famously establishes the authoritative gaze as rendering bodies knowable, but I contend that the audible world remained a contested and occulted space that resisted classification. Sound was central to nineteenth-century investigations of the human. In the texts I examine, characters confront the sonic qualities of corporeal beings, which challenge them to listen in unconventional ways. Although the listening practices necessary to interpret these qualities are often disorienting, they enable characters to recognize networks of influence that reshape the conditions of embodiment, which had become what William A. Cohen describes as the ?untranscendable horizon of the human.? These connections offer the possibility of meaningful interaction yet simultaneously endanger the listener. In the unsettled realm of Gothic fiction, sound is framed as a force that can both empower and disempower bodies as it circulates within and between them. Establishing a new awareness of bodies as soundscapes in their own right, Sounding Bodies and Voices elucidates how Gothic works draw on nineteenth- century scientific practices to reimagine the contours of the human.

The present study investigates the use of high-frequency verb collocations in L2 learner English. Although it has been widely accepted that collocations are essential to language use, until recently, the complexity of collocations was mainly hidden. However, developments in the new technology of corpus linguistics and the availability of large electronic texts from spoken and written sources have made possible new perspectives to learner language use. In addition, learner corpus data constitutes a new type of performance data which offers a valuable view of learners’ errors and non-errors as well. This study is thus embedded in a combination of elaborate manual investigation and computer-aided analysis using a concordance program, WordSmith Tools. The results of this study show that errors are not entirely mismatch between the verb and the noun, and other types such as prepositional errors and determiner errors were relatively more frequent among advanced L2 learners. It is also found that the interference of the Korean learners’ L1 plays a role in the use of collocations. Based on the results, some suggestions are made for collocation learning that is helpful for EFL learners.

O presente trabalho, vinculado ao projeto SAL, apresenta um estudo da realização de processos verbais em língua portuguesa do Brasil em textos da área de Engenharia Civil. O objetivo é analisar quais formas linguísticas realizam processos verbais, com que frequência são usados e que significados produzem em textos científicos dessa área. O corpus de análise constitui-se de 51 textos que compõem os volumes 1 e 2 do livro "Concreto: ciência e tecnologia", publicada pelo IBRACON (Instituto Brasileiro do Concreto). Para a compilação do corpus, seguiram-se princípios da Linguística de Corpus (Sardinha, 2004; Almeida &amp; Correia, 2008). A identificação das formas linguísticas e o tratamento quantitativo dos dados foram realizados com auxílio das ferramentas WordListe Concord do WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 2008). A análise das formas linguísticas foi realizada com base nos critérios da Gramática Sistêmico-Funcional (Halliday &amp; Matthiessen, 2004) para descrição e classificação de processos verbais. Os resultados apontam que os verbos mais frequentes do corpus, recomendar e especificar, funcionam como processos de semiose do tipo comando e podem ser consideradas características do discurso científico na área de Engenharia Civil.Formas linguísticas em terceira pessoa do presente e no particípio servem como recurso de impessoalização no discurso científico.

This book offers a comprehensive linguistic analysis of contemporary US television series. Adopting an interdisciplinary and multimethodological approach, Monika Bednarek brings together linguistic analysis of the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue with analysis of scriptwriting manuals, interviews with Hollywood scriptwriters, and a survey undertaken with university students about their consumption of TV series. In so doing, she presents five new and original empirical studies. The focus on language use in a professional context (the television industry), on scriptwriting pedagogy, and on learning and teaching provides an applied linguistic lens on TV series. This is complemented by perspectives taken from media linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociocultural linguistics/sociolinguistics. Throughout the book, multiple dialogue extracts are presented from a wide variety of well-known fictional television series, including The Big Bang Theory, Grey's Anatomy and Bones. Researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and media linguistics will find the book both stimulating and unique in its approach.

This chapter describes one project’s approach to fostering uptake of corpus tools in research beyond corpus linguistics. It introduces the Hansard at Huddersfield web application, a new search tool that combines tried-and-tested corpus tools with interactive visualisations to make Hansard, the official record of the UK parliament (1803–2021), more accessible for in-depth study by non-specialists. The chapter outlines the thinking behind and development of the Hansard at Huddersfield web interface and exemplifies how the site’s adapted corpus tools offer non-linguists new entry points for Hansard research through three small sample studies. It further reflects on the process of preparing the large Hansard corpus to allow insights to be gleaned from corpus-style searches by researchers with relatively little training.

This thesis is concerned with the role played by software tools in the analysis and dissemination of linguistic corpora and their contribution to a more widespread adoption of corpora in different fields. Chapter 1 contains an overview of some of the most relevant corpus analysis tools available today, presenting their most interesting features and some of their drawbacks. Chapter 2 begins with an explanation of the reasons why none of the available tools appear to satisfy the requirements of the user community and then continues with technical overview of the current status of the new system developed as part of this work. This presentation is followed by highlights of features that make the system appealing to users and corpus builders (i.e. scholars willing to make their corpora available to the public). The chapter concludes with an indication of future directions for the projects and information on the current availability of the software. Chapter 3 describes the design of an experiment devised to evaluate the usability of the new system in comparison to another corpus tool. Usage of the tool was tested in the context of a documentation task performed on a real assignment during a translation class in a master's degree course. In chapter 4 the findings of the experiment are presented on two levels of analysis: firstly a discussion on how participants interacted with and evaluated the two corpus tools in terms of interface and interaction design, usability and perceived ease of use. Then an analysis follows of how users interacted with corpora to complete the task and what kind of queries they submitted. Finally, some general conclusions are drawn and areas for future work are outlined.