A Stylometric Analysis Of Charles Dickens’ Works And Virginia Woolf’s Works

This paper takes a formalist point of view and adopts the empirical method to compare two literary works. In other words, the primary concern is to treat literary works as self-sufficient and independent texts, then compare some major markers of the two literary works. By comparing A Tale of Two Cities which is one of the most representative novels of Charles Dickens who observes the realism tradition and Mrs. Dalloway which is one of the representative works of Virginia Woolf who is a modernist writer, not only can we find the differences between these two novels, but also to some extent, reveal some characteristics of the new techniques of the latter literary invention which has a huge influence in literary history. Major stylometric markers being analyzed and compared include word length, sentence length, mean paragraph length, punctuation, TTR, vocabulary growth rate, and key words analysis.Major findings:the average sentence length of Mrs. Dalloway is longer than that of A Tale of Two Cities mainly because the author used more short conversations while in Mrs. Dalloway, long and unbroken description of the free flowing of mind leads to relatively longer average sentence; in terms of mean paragraph length, Mrs. Dalloway is more than twice the mean paragraph length of A Tale of Two Cities also because there are more descriptions of the inner thinking of the protagonists in Mrs. Dalloway, which also confirms one of the dominant features of the stream of consciousness technique; punctuation distributions of the two novels are similar except that Dickens used more quotation marks in conversations while Woolf used more semicolon in order to better describe the protagonists’ mental activities; both TTR and Vocabulary Growth Rate of the two novels are significantly different. So in terms of vocabulary richness, the vocabulary of Mrs. Dalloway is more varied than A Tale of Two Cities, which contributes to the difficulty of reading of works of stream of consciousness and also confirms people’s impression that works of stream of consciousness is rather difficult to understand; the analysis of key words shows some modernist and feminist feature in Woolf’s work.This paper makes a comparative analysis of the styles between different literary works from a stylometric perspective with an empirical method which is easier to quantify and more objective.