A Computational Stylistic Analysis Of Dickens' Novels On The Level Of Lexis

Charles Dickens was perhaps the greatest novelist of the 19th century. All his novels are still in sprint and they present a rich canvas of life and behavior at all levels of contemporary society. Many of his works, such as Oliver Twist, Great Expectation, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities have been filmed, televised and presented as both straight plays and musicals, revealing the power and timeless of his writing.In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the application of statistical technique to literary text. This thesis tries to use computational stylistic approach to analyze all Dickens'novels in the three periods on lexical level. Three corpora are established, with each containing six novels in each period. With the help of 4 suites of FoxPro Program and the software SPSS, three corpora are processed to obtain the original data, then the data are analyzed on the four lexical-level style markers-word length, lexical richness, word frequency distribution and common words. By comparing novels of the three periods, many significant differences are revealed on the lexical level.