A Stylometric Analysis Of The Color Purple And Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God is the masterpiece of Zora Neale Hurston,which was published in 1937.It is generally recognized as one of the classics of black women literature,whose theme is of black women searching for self-realization and self-expression.Under the influence of Hurston,Alice Walker inherits and develops the tradition of black women literature.In 1980 s,Walker's representative work The Color Purple depicts a real life of black women struggling to liberate themselves from the oppression of racism and sexism.Being regarded as ‘mother and daughter' in literature area,the two novels have great similarities in terms of narrative strategies and plots.On the other hand,the two authors have different background and writing characteristics,hence different stylistic features.This corpus-based study attempts to apply statistic and analytic methods to systematically compare and analyze the stylistic features of Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple.This paper analyzes and compares some of the important style markers of the two novels,such as paragraphing,punctuation distribution,word length and sentence length and comes to the conclusion that there are both similarities and significant differences between the two writers.The languages in both novels are typical southern American black English,but there are more vernacular expressions in Their Eyes Were Watching God,while The Color Purple,as an epistolary novel,has more written expressions.The two novels,on the whole,are easy to understand,but Their Eyes Were Watching God is comparatively more complex in respect to word and sentence length than The Color Purple.In addition,through multidimensional analysis of the two novels,the results indicate that they bear a striking resemblance in terms of genre and text type.This comparative study of Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple from the perspective of stylometry,i.e.primary quantitative analysis and some qualitative analysis on the base of statistical analysis can offer some objective and scientific statistical evidences to the comparative study of literary works and find some new linguistic features between them.