A Computational Stylistic Analysis Of Gone With The Wind And Scarlett--A Contrastive Study

The past years have seen the use of statistical methods in the analysis of literary style, which has proved to be very helpful and complementary rather than contradictory to more conventional studies made by literary scholars. This corpus-based study attempts to characterize the individual stylistic features of GWTW and Scarlett in addition to a comparison made between them. Quantitative techniques are essential in this study. For word and sentence length analyses, tests of statistical significance are also included. Apart from the identification of quantitative patterns, qualitative interpretations are concentrated upon. Examination of the lexical and grammatical features of the two literary works show that there are linguistic evidence which validate the suspicion about the different styles of GWTW and Scarlett. This preliminary study suggests that quantitative approaches to literary style provide important possibilities for formalizing intuitive stylistic judgments and bring greater precision and a broader range of evidence.