The Stylometric Analysis Of James Joyce's Works And Virginia Woolf's Works

SOC writings in the twentieth century of England created a new epoch of modern novels and gained a rapid prominence in recent years. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, as the two main representative authors of SOC novels, are different from each other in many aspects due to the different sex and point of views although some common features on language are shared by them. From the perspective of Stylometry, this research compares and analyzes the two authors' works objectively and comprehensively.The two corpuses are first constructed including James Joyce's and Viginia Woolf's over 260,000-word works respectively. With the aid of computer program FoxPro and SPSS and based on the theory of Stylometry, a comparative stylistic study between the two authors is conducted quantitatively and qualitatively at the levels of graphology, lexicon, grammar, and semantics.The results indicate that the two authors resemble in grammar for the same literary genre they belong to, which no distinctive difference is found in mean sentence length, coordinators and subordinators in the both except the usage of passive voice. Whereas, the great differences are shown on graphological, lexical and semantic level for the different personal styles in literature: though Joyce's paragraph number is less than Woolf's, the paragraph length is longer than the latter and much more punctuation marks can be observed in Joyce's creations; the mean word length is shorter than Woolf's, but the word frequency and word growth rate are higher than Woolf's. The most significant difference, however, should be the employment of discourse patterns in the two, which Joyce prefers the third narrator "he" to Woolf's extensive adoption of "she" in works because of the unlikeness of sex and themes.The thesis presents a novel analyzing method for the SOC works which involves diversified languages, numerous terms, various styles and obscure structures, and it provides an objective and scientific means for the contrastive study of literary works.