Capturing Poe in the Gothic Tales – Exploring Allan Poe’s Stylistic Distinctiveness from Computational Stylistic Approach
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Stylistics has long been focused on the excellence of technique, with the goal of exploring the relation between language structure and its function (Leech and Short, 2007). The literary approach of stylistics explains the choice of language in terms of its artistic effects, treating stylistics as a bridge between linguistic analysis to literary criticism (Carter and Simpson, 1989). On the other hand, the fast development of natural language processing and corpus-based statistical technology has made it possible to study linguistic patterns of literary texts in large quantities. As a result, this development furthers the study of some original concerns of authorial style, such as if an author’s style is as distinguishable as those critics have believed (Busse & McIntyre, 2010). Researchers have employed corpus and computational methods in the study of authorship attribution, however, most of these studies have focused on attributing unknown texts to possible candidates while rarely making attempts to identify the stylistic features contributing to the author’s distinctiveness. Thus, Hugh Craig (1999) argued that authorship attribution should go hand in hand with stylistic description. Our study draws on both literary stylistic description and the techniques used in authorship attribution to explore the stylistic distinctiveness of Edgar Allan Poe to construct the stylistic profile of a gothic writer with both stylistic descriptiveness and statistical rigor.