RATIONALITY VS. IRRATIONALITY: QUANTIFYING LEXICAL ATMOSPHERES IN DETECTIVE AND GOTHIC FICTION
Keywords:
Computational Literary Analysis, TF-IDF, Detective Fiction, Gothic Literature, Sentiment Analysis, Digital HumanitiesAbstract
This thesis investigates the opposition between rationality and irrationality in late 19th and early 20th-century British literature by applying computational text analysis methods. Using a curated corpus of ten canonical works sourced from Project Gutenberg, the study employs TF-IDF (Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency) to identify genre-specific lexical patterns. By mitigating Named Entity Bias through custom filtering techniques, the research distinguishes between the procedural, analytical language of detective fiction and the emotive, psychological lexicon of Gothic literature. Furthermore, sentiment trajectory analysis reveals fundamentally different emotional structures in each genre. The findings demonstrate that literary atmospheres are not merely interpretive constructs but quantifiable linguistic realities.
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