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Advances in Corpus Applications in
Literary and Translation Studies
Professor Riccardo Moratto and Professor Defeng Li present contributions focus-

ing on the interdisciplinarity of corpus studies, with a special emphasis on literary
and translation studies which offer a broad and varied picture of the promise and
potential of methods and approaches. Inside scholars share their research find-
ings concerning current advances in corpus applications in literary and transla-
tion studies and explore possible and tangible collaborative research projects. The
volume is split into two sections focusing on the applications of corpora in literary
studies and translation studies. Issues explored include historical backgrounds,
current trends, theories, methodologies, operational methods, and techniques, as
well as training of research students.
This international, dynamic, and interdisciplinary exploration of corpus studies
and corpus application in various cultural contexts and different countries will
provide valuable insights for any researcher in literary or translation studies who
wishes to have a better understanding when working with corpora.
Riccardo Moratto (PhD, FCIL) is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Stud-

ies and Chinese Literature in Translation at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation
and Translation, Shanghai International Studies University.
Defeng Li, Professor of Translation Studies, is Associate Dean of Faculty of Arts

and Humanities and Director of the Centre for Studies of Translation, Interpreting,
and Cognition (CSTIC) at the University of Macau.
Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies
Translating Controversial Texts in East Asian Contexts

A Methodology for the Translation of “Controversy”
Adam Zulawnik
Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation

Edited by James Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos da Silva Cardoso
Teixeira, and Antonio Toral
Relevance Theory in Translation and Interpreting

A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach
Fabrizio Gallai
Towards a Feminist Translator Studies

Intersectional Activism in Translation and Publishing
Helen Vassallo
The Behavioral Economics of Translation

Douglas Robinson
Online Collaborative Translation in China and Beyond

Community, Practice, and Identity
Chuan Yu
Advances in Corpus Applications in Literary and Translation Studies

Edited by Riccardo Moratto and Defeng Li
Institutional Translator Training

Edited by Tomáš Svoboda, Łucja Biel, and Vilelmini Sosoni
For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Advances-in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RTS.
Advances in Corpus
Applications in Literary and
Translation Studies
Edited by Riccardo Moratto and

Defeng Li
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa

business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Riccardo Moratto and Defeng Li;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Riccardo Moratto and Defeng Li to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-28738-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-28740-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-29832-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003298328
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of Tables viii

List of Figures xi
Notes on Editors xiii
Notes on Contributors xiv
Introduction 1
RICCARDO MORATTO AND DEFENG LI
1 Diachronic Trends in Fiction Authors’ Conceptualizations of

their Practices 10
DARRYL HOCKING AND PAUL MOUNTFORT
2 Within-Author Style Variation in Literary Nonfiction:

The Situational Perspective 26
MARIANNA GRACHEVA AND JESSE A. EGBERT
3 Charles Dickens’s Influence on Benito Pérez Galdós

Revisited: A Corpus-Stylistic Approach 48
PABLO RUANO SAN SEGUNDO
4 A Corpus-Stylistic Approach to the Literary Representation

of Narrative Space in Ruiz Zafón’s The Cemetery of
Forgotten Books Series 65
GUADALUPE NIETO CABALLERO AND PABLO RUANO SAN SEGUNDO
5 Analyzing Who, What, and Where in a Mediæval

Chinese Corpus: A Case Study on the Chinese Buddhist
Canon 81
TAK-SUM WONG AND JOHN SIE YUEN LEE
vi Contents
6 Corpora and Literary Translation 103
TITIKA DIMITROULIA
7 Orality in Translated and Non-Translated Fictional

Dialogues 119
YANFANG SU AND KANGLONG LIU
8 The Avoidance of Repetition in Translation: A Multifactorial

Study of Repeated Reporting Verbs in the Italian Translation
of the Harry Potter Series 138
LORENZO MASTROPIERRO
9 Feminist Translation of Sexual Content: A Quantitative

Study on Chinese Versions of The Color Purple 158
XINYI ZENG AND JOHN SIE YUEN LEE
10 Benefits of a Corpus-based Approach to Translations: The

Example of Huckleberry Finn 176
RONALD JENN AND AMEL FRAISSE
11 Are Translated Chinese Wuxia Fiction and Western Heroic

Literature Similar? A Stylometric Analysis Based on
Stylistic Panoramas 191
KAN WU AND DECHAO LI
12 Translating Personal Reference: A Corpus-Based

Study of the English Translation of Legends of the Condor
Heroes 213
JING FANG AND SHIWEI FU
13 Lexical Bundles in the Fictional Dialogues of Two

Hongloumeng Translations: A Corpus-Assisted
Approach 229
KANGLONG LIU, JOYCE OIWUN CHEUNG, AND RICCARDO MORATTO
14 Mapping Culture-Specific and Creative Metaphors

in Lu Xun’s Short Stories by L1 and L2 English
Translators: A Corpus-Assisted Relevance-Theoretical
Account 254
LINPING HOU AND DEFENG LI
Contents vii
15 On a Historical Approach to Cantonese Studies: A Corpus-
Based Contrastive Analysis of the Use of Classifiers in
Historical and Recent Translations of the Four Gospels 281
TAK-SUM WONG AND WAI-MUN LEUNG
Index 300
Tables
1.1 Word Composition of the FAC 13

1.2 High-Frequency Upward-Trending Lemmas in the FAC
(freq. ≥ 50, p < 0.05) 14
1.3 High-Frequency Downward-Trending Lemmas in the FAC
(freq. ≥ 50, p < 0.05) 15
1.4 1950s Keywords 19
2.1 Range of Variation along Dimensions 29
2.2 “Interactive vs. Informational Style” Dimension Scores across
Communicative Purposes in Phillip Lopate’s Essays 33
2.3 “Immediate vs. Removed Style” Dimension Scores across
Communicative Purposes in David Shields’s Essays 37
2.4 Clusters Identified in Ander Monson’s Essays 41
3.1 Annotation Tags Used to Annotate Fortunata and Jacinta 52
4.1 Novels by Ruiz Zafón 68
4.2 Clusters in Ruiz Zafón’s Novels 69
5.1 Named Entity Recognition Performance on the Test Set 84
5.2 Precision and Recall in Subject-Verb Pair Extraction from
L&K Treebank 87
5.3 Most Frequent Characters (As Nominal Subjects) in the
Corpus 88
5.4 Most Frequent Characters in the Two Subcorpora of the Canon 89
5.5 Most Frequent Verbs with Buddha (Left) and Other Characters
(Right) as Subject 90
5.6 Most Frequent Verbs of Three Different Characters 91
5.7 Precision and Recall in Character-Toponym Pair Extraction in
the Test Set 95
Tables ix
5.8 Most Frequent Places Associated with the Three Major Epithets
of Buddha and with Other Characters 97
7.1 Composition of the Fictional Dialogue Corpus 124
7.2 Score of Dimension 1 126
7.3 Results of Mann-Whitney U-Test 129
8.1 Overview of the Data and Sub-Datasets 144
8.2 Reporting Verb Taxonomy 146
8.3 Generalized Linear Model: Series 148
8.4 Generalized Linear Model: Translator 1 148
8.5 Generalized Linear Model: Translator 2 149
8.6 Generalized Linear Model: HbP 149
9.1 Breakdown 197 Sentences in Our Corpus According
to Sexual Content Type 161
9.2 The Spectrum of Translation Strategies Annotated in Our
Corpus 162
9.3 Translation Strategies Illustrated with Example Translations 163
9.4 Breakdown of Translation Strategy Frequency in Feminist (Tao)
and Non-Feminist (Yang) Translation 165
9.5 Sentence-Level Comparison of the Translation Strategies
in the Feminist (Tao) and Non-Feminist (Yang) Translations 166
9.6 Example Sentences for Each Sexual Content Type 168
11.1 Details of the Translated Wuxia Stories 194
11.2 Details of the Chivalric Stories 195
11.3 Details of the Heroic Fantasies 195
11.4 Statistics of the Stylistic Indices across the Genres 197
11.5 Average Distances between Each Wuxia Translation and the
Western Counterparts 206
11.6 Reception of the Six Wuxia Translations in English
(Up to 02/2021) 208
12.1 Personal References Used by Guo Jing in LoCH 219
12.2 Translation Equivalence by Social Status (Speaker-Reference) 221
12.3 Chi-Square Test Result of Translation Equivalence and Social
Status (Speaker-Reference) 221
12.4 Translation Equivalence by Social Status (Addressee-Reference) 224
12.5 Chi-Square Test Result of Translation Equivalence and Social
Status (Addressee-Reference) 224
13.1 Descriptive Statistics of Fictional Dialogues in HD and YD 234
13.2 Types and Tokens of 3-Word and 4-Word LBs in HD and YD 234
13.3 Structural Classifications of Key-LBs in HD and YD 236
13.4 Statistics of VPBased Key-LBs in HD and YD 236
13.5 Statistics of PPBased Key-LBs in YD 236
13.6 Functional Classifications of Key-LBs in HD and YD 239
13.7 Statistics of Stance Key-LBs in HD and YD 240
13.8 Statistics of Referential Key-LBs in HD and YD 240
x Tables
14.1 Rendering Strategies of Conventional Culture-Specific
Metaphors 265
14.2 Rendering Strategies of Creative Culture-Specific Metaphors 265
14.3 Rendering Strategies of Conventional Culture-Universal
Metaphors 265
14.4 Rendering Strategies of Creative Culture-Universal Metaphors 265
15.1 List of Top 10 Classifiers Present in the Contemporary
Cantonese Translation of the Four Gospels 286
15.2 List of Top 10 Classifiers Present in the Historical Cantonese
Translation of the Four Gospels 288
15.3 The Most Frequently Observed Classifiers Present in the
Recent Cantonese Translation of the Four Gospels 290
15.4 The Most Frequently Observed Classifiers Present in the
Historical Cantonese Translation of the Four Gospels 291
15.5 Reduplicated Classifiers in the Cantonese Translation of the
2010 Edition of the Four Gospels (N = 11) 295
15.6 Reduplicated Classifiers in the Cantonese Translation of the
1880s edition of the Four Gospels (N = 32) 295
Figures
2.1 Phillip Lopate’s essays: spread of scores on “interactive vs.

informational style.” 30
2.2 David Shields’s essays: spread of scores on “immediate vs.
removed style.” 31
2.3 Ander Monson’s essays: spread of scores on “abstract expository
vs. concrete descriptive style.” 32
2.4 Phillip Lopate: variation by communicative purpose on
“interactive vs. informational style.” 34
2.5 David Shields: variation by communicative purpose on
“immediate vs. removed style.” 38
2.6 Ander Monson: variation by communicative purpose on
“abstract expository vs. concrete descriptive style.” 40
2.7 Ander Monson’s essays: three-cluster solution. 41
2.8 Clusters identified in Ander Monson’s essays. 42
3.1 Example 2 with annotation. 52
3.2 Screenshot of 50 suspensions in Fortunata and Jacinta. 53
3.3 Screenshot of CLiC tool with 20 suspensions from Oliver Twist. 54
4.1 Screenshot of concordance a la puerta de la in Ruiz Zafón’s
novels. 72
5.1 Example dependency tree to illustrate character-verb pair
extraction (K229). 86
5.2 Most frequent verbs with nominal subjects. 90
5.3 Dependency tree with a character-toponym pair involving a
verb. 92
5.4 Dependency tree with a character-toponym pair involving a
preposition. 93
5.5 Most frequent verbs that take toponyms as direct objects. 93
5.6 Most frequent prepositions that take toponyms as prepositional
objects. 94
5.7 The ten toponyms most frequently mentioned with a character. 96
6.1 Melby’s eight types of translation technology (1998, 1). 105
7.1 Scores for dimension 1 of different registers. 127
8.1 Concordance sample for reporting verbs attributed to Harry. 144
xii Figures
8.2 Query for reply in Treq. 145
8.3 Query for urged in WordNet. 146
8.4 “Freq” effect plots. 150
8.5 “Freq” effect plots without said. 151
9.1 Overall distribution of translation strategies for sexual content
in feminist (Tao) and non-feminist (Yang) translation. 165
9.2 Overall distribution of translation strategies according to
sexual content type in feminist (Tao) and non-feminist (Yang)
translation. 167
9.3 Sentence-level comparison: the number of sentences translated
with a more explicit strategy in the feminist (Tao) than non-
feminist (Yang) translation, and vice versa. 168
10.1 Excerpt of the Translation Dashboard for Basque, Bulgarian,
Dutch, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese,
Russian, and Ukrainian (first five chapters). 180
10.2 Example of paragraph alignment for the Basque version. 181
10.3 Example of paragraph alignment for the Bulgarian version. 182
11.1 Stylistic panoramas of the three subgenres, from a global view. 198
11.2 Cluster dendrogram of the HCA-based stylistic panoramas. 200
11.3 Sample parallel list for the MFWs in the selected works. 202
11.4 Sample parallel list for the MFWSs (2-grams) in the selected
works. 202
11.5 Sample parallel list for the MFWSs (3-grams) in the selected
works. 202
11.6 PCA graph of individuals, based on the top 1,000 MFWs. 203
11.7 PCA graph of individuals, based on the top 1,000 2-grams. 204
11.8 PCA graph of individuals, based on the top 1,000 3-grams. 205
12.1 Lexicogrammatical realization of speech roles in LoCH (ST). 217
14.1 RT translation route of metaphors by L1 and L2 translators. 266
Notes on Editors
Riccardo Moratto (PhD, FCIL) is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Stud-

ies and Chinese Literature in Translation at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation
and Translation, Shanghai International Studies University; Chartered Linguist
and Fellow Member of CIOL; Editor in Chief of Interpreting Studies for Shanghai
Foreign Language Education Press (外教社); General Editor of Routledge Stud-
ies in East Asian Interpreting; and General Editor of Routledge Interdisciplinary
and Transcultural Approaches to Chinese Literature. Professor Moratto is also
Honorary Guest Professor at the College of Foreign Studies, Nanjing Agricultural
University; Honorary Research Fellow at the Center for Translation Studies of
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies; and Expert Member of the Translators
Association of China (TAC). Professor Moratto is an international conference
interpreter and renowned literary translator. He has published extensively in the
field of translation and interpreting studies and Chinese literature in translation.
Defeng Li, Professor of Translation Studies, is Associate Dean of Faculty of Arts

and Humanities and Director of the Centre for Studies of Translation, Interpreting,
and Cognition (CSTIC) at the University of Macau. Prior to his current appoint-
ment, he served as Chair of the Centre for Translation Studies and Reader in
Translation Studies at SOAS, University of London; Director of the MA in Trans-
lation and Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Dean
and Chair Professor at Shandong University (adjunct); and Chair Professor at
Shanghai Jiaotong University (adjunct). He is currently President of the Interna-
tional Association of Translation, Interpreting, and Cognition (IATIC) and World
Interpreter and Translator Training Association (WITTA). He has researched and
published extensively in the field of cognitive translation studies, corpus-assisted
translation studies, curriculum development in translator training, research meth-
ods in translation studies, professional translation (e.g., business, journalistic,
legal translation), as well as second language education.
Notes on Contributors
CHEUNG, Joyce Oiwun, is a PhD student at the Department of Chinese and

Bilingual Studies of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her current research
interests include corpus linguistics, translation studies, and discourse analysis. She
has previously published in linguistic journals such as Social Semiotics and Recall.
DIMITROULIA, Titika, is Professor of Translation Studies at Aristotle Univer-

sity of Thessaloniki, Greece, a translator and a literary critic. Her research interests
range from literary translation to translation technologies, with emphasis on text
analysis and translation history. Her publications include the volumes Translation
and Memory (2021), Literary Translation (2015), and Digital Literary Studies
(2015), and articles in various journals and edited volumes. She is member of the
board of Petra-E network for the education and training of literary translators,
and she coordinates at Aristotle University the Clarin-Apollonis project. She has
translated numerous libretti and published books and articles on literary criticism.
EGBERT, Jesse A., is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern

Arizona University. Jesse specializes in register variation, quantitative methods in
linguistics, and corpus linguistic approaches to legal interpretation. He is Found-
ing General Editor of Register Studies, Technical Strand Editor for the series
Cambridge Elements in Corpus Linguistics, and Co-Editor of the Routledge series
Advances in Corpus Linguistics. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed
papers. Recent books include Using Corpus Methods to Triangulate Linguistic
Analysis (Routledge, 2019), Doing Linguistics with a Corpus: Methodological
Considerations for the Everyday User (Cambridge, 2020), and Designing and
Evaluating Language Corpora (Cambridge, 2022).
FANG, Jing, is a lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program at Mac-

quarie University. She has a PhD in linguistics and a master’s degree in transla-
tion and interpreting. Her current research interests include systemic functional
linguistics, corpus-based translation studies, and sight translation research.
FRAISSE, Amel, is Associate Professor at Université de Lille, working on

information science and digital humanities. Her research focuses on information
Notes on Contributors xv
extraction, knowledge acquisition and visualization, multilingualism and multi-
culturalism, and under-resourced languages and cultures. She received a PhD in
Computer Science in 2010 from Université de Grenoble. Her dissertation focused
on issues of software localization, globalization, and internationalization process.
From 2013 to 2015, she worked as a CNRS postdoctoral fellow at the LIMSI-
CNRS laboratory (Orsay-Saclay, south of Paris), where she worked on natural
language processing tasks and more specifically on building multilingual corpora
and lexicon for sentiment analysis and opinion mining tasks.
FU, Shiwei, is PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie

University. She is also a PhD candidate in the School of Foreign Languages and
Literature at Wuhan University. Her research interests include Chinese literary
translation, corpus-based translation studies, and translation theories.
GRACHEVA, Marianna, is PhD Candidate in Applied Linguistics at North-

ern Arizona University. Marianna’s linguistic interests include register and style
variation, grammar, and corpus linguistics. Her dissertation research focuses on
intra-speaker style variation across registers in literary, academic, and political
domains, as well as inter-speaker variation within registers, and investigates the
relationship between individual linguistic style and the situation of use.
HOCKING, Darryl, is Senior Lecturer at Auckland University of Technology,

New Zealand. His research primarily uses corpus, genre, and discourse analysis
to examine the interactional genres and communicative practices in art and design
settings and how these impact on creative activity. He is the author of the books
Communicating Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Impact of Everyday
Language Change on the Practices of Visual Artists (Cambridge University Press).
HOU, Linping, received his PhD in English Linguistics, specializing in Cogni-

tive Translation Studies, from the Centre for Studies of Translation, Interpreting,
and Cognition (CSTIC) at the University of Macau. He is Professor of Transla-
tion Studies in the English Department at Shandong University of Science and
Technology and Director of the Center for Cognitive Translation Studies (CCTS).
His main research interests include corpus-assisted translation studies, cognitive
translation studies, and cognitive pragmatics. He has published more than 20 arti-
cles in all these areas.
JENN, Ronald, is Professor of Translation Studies at Université de Lille, France.

He coauthored Mark Twain & France (University of Missouri Press, 2017) with
Paula Harrington. After a France-Berkeley project on the “ ‘French Marginalia’
of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc” with Linda Morris, his
research now focuses on how Translation Studies and digital humanities can inter-
act, using Huckleberry Finn as a case in point. This is what the France-Stanford
ROSETTA/Global Huck project has done, in collaboration with Shelley Fisher
Fishkin and Amel Fraisse (https://rosetta.huma-num.fr/worldmap/).
xvi Notes on Contributors
LEE, John Sie Yuen, is Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics and
Translation at City University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in Computer
Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interest is in
natural language processing and its applications in digital humanities, translation
studies, and computer-assisted language learning.
LEUNG, Wai-Mun, is Associate Professor of Applied Chinese Linguistics at the

Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic Uni-
versity. Her research interests include Cantonese studies, language planning and
policy, Chinese-language education, and teaching Chinese to non-Chinese-speak-
ing students. She recently constructed “The 19th Century (1865–1894) Cantonese
Christian Writings Database 十九世紀中後期（1865–1894）粵語基督教典籍
資料庫.” She is also the first author of the monograph Biliteracy and Trilingual-
ism: Language Education Policy Research in Hong Kong (兩文三語：香港語文
教育政策研究, CityU Press, 2020), in which a chapter is devoted to discussing
Cantonese.
LI, Dechao, is Associate Professor of the Department of Chinese and Bilingual

Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He also serves as Chief Editor of
Translation Quarterly, a journal published by the Hong Kong Translation Soci-
ety. His main research areas include corpus-based translation studies, empirical
approaches to translation process research, history of translation in the late Qing
and early Republican periods, and PBL and translator/interpreter training.
LI, Defeng, is Professor of Translation Studies and Director of the Centre for
Studies of Translation, Interpreting, and Cognition (CSTIC) at the University of
Macau. Previously, he served as Chair of the Centre for Translation Studies and
Reader in Translation Studies at SOAS, University of London. He is President of
the International Association of Translation, Interpreting, and Cognition (IATIC)
and World Interpreter and Translator Training Association (WITTA). He has
researched and published extensively in the field of cognitive translation studies,
corpus-assisted translation studies, curriculum development in translator train-
ing, research methods in translation studies, professional translation, as well as
second-language education.
LIU, Kanglong, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilin-

gual Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He specializes in corpus-
based translation studies, and his main interests include empirical approaches to
translation studies, translation pedagogy, and corpus-based translation research.
MASTROPIERRO, Lorenzo is Lecturer in English Language and Translation

at the University of Insubria (Como, Italy). He holds a PhD in English Linguis-
tics from the University of Nottingham (UK). His research sits at the intersec-
tion between corpus linguistics, stylistics, and translation studies. He has worked
extensively on corpus stylistic approaches to literary translation, publishing a
Notes on Contributors xvii
monograph with Bloomsbury (Corpus Stylistics in Heart of Darkness and its
Italian Translations) and several papers/chapters on topics such as translated
cohesive networks, translator style as opposed to author style, the translation of
repeated items, reader-response analysis, and the translation of reporting verbs.
MORATTO, Riccardo, is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies

and Chinese Literature in Translationat the Graduate Institute of Interpretation
and Translation, Shanghai International Studies University; Chartered Linguist
and Fellow Member of CIOL (FCIL); Editor in Chief of Interpreting Studies
for Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press (外教社); General Editor of
Routledge Studies in East Asian Interpreting; and General Editor of Routledge
Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Approaches to Chinese Literature. Professor
Moratto is also Honorary Guest Professor at the College of Foreign Studies, Nan-
jing Agricultural University, and Expert Member of the Translators Association of
China (TAC). Professor Moratto has published extensively in the field of transla-
tion and interpreting studies and Chinese literature in translation.
MOUNTFORT, Paul, is Associate Professor in Auckland University of Technol-

ogy’s School of Communication Studies, and former Chair of the AUT Centre
for Creative Writing. His research interests are narrative design and transmedia
studies.
NIETO CABALLERO, Guadalupe, is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Univer-

sidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Her main research interests are in twenti-
eth-century Hispanic prose. She also works on digital humanities and on corpus
stylistics, with a particular focus on Spanish authors. She has published several
articles on corpus stylistics, and she is the coauthor of Estilística de corpus:
nuevos enfoques en el análisis de textos literarios (2020, Peter Lang).
RUANO SAN SEGUNDO, Pablo, is Senior Lecturer at the University of Extrem-

adura, Spain. His research interests are in corpus linguistics, corpus stylistics, and
corpus translation studies, with a particular interest in Charles Dickens’s narrative
fiction. He has published a number of articles and chapters in edited books in
this area and is coauthor of the book Estilística de corpus: nuevos enfoques en el
análisis de textos literarios (Peter Lang, 2020).
SU, Yanfang, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Chinese and

Bilingual Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research inter-
ests include corpus linguistics, corpus-based translation studies, and computer-
assisted language learning.
WONG, Tak-Sum (黃得森), 黃得森 is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chi-

nese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received
his BEng in Computer Science from Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology (2004), and PhD in Linguistics from City University of Hong Kong
xviii Notes on Contributors
(2018). He has built a treebank of the Tripiṭaka Koreana during his doctoral study
and has been working on the quantitative study of historical syntax. His research
expertise covers Chinese historical linguistics, Cantonese linguistics, corpus lin-
guistics, computer-assisted language learning, Chinese dialectology, and Chinese
paleography. Recently, he is working on historical Sinitic brush-talk materials
from East Asian nations.
WU, Kan, is Lecturer of Translation Studies, School of Foreign Languages,

Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Dongfang College. His research
interests include corpus-based translation studies and digital humanity.
ZENG, Xinyi, earned her master’s degree in Conference Interpreting and Trans-
lation from the University of Essex. She is currently a PhD candidate at the
Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong. Her
research focus is on feminist translation and corpus-based translation studies.
Introduction
Riccardo MORATTO and Defeng LI
One of the most striking developments in the area of humanities over the past dec-
ades is probably the increasing integration of humanities with computing, which
has resulted in the growth and popularity of digital humanities (DH) as a new dis-
cipline of studies. As technology develops fast, so do the tools made available to
humanities scholars and their applications in humanities research. Consequently,
it has become very difficult to define DH, as its definitions become outdated very
quickly.
However, the difficulty in defining DH has not deterred the increasingly wider
use of digital resources and tools in humanities research and the analysis of such
applications. As a matter of fact, recent years have seen the applications acceler-
ated. Fine examples are the introduction and integration of corpus linguistics in
the study of literature across the world. As Gonçalves states:
Corpus Linguistics can be a powerful tool in the analysis of literary texts,

especially when allied with non-computational approaches, to bring into
light interpretations, thematic details, critically important words in a text,
and other information that to other types of analysis might go unseen. By
enabling the researcher to process a large quantity of data, and by giving a
statistical treatment to the information obtained, Corpus Linguistics provides
an ideal approach to study various characteristics of a literary text that would
otherwise have gone unnoticed.
(2016, 42)
Biber (2011, 15) surveyed corpus-assisted analytical techniques for the analysis
of literature. He pointed out that “most of these studies focus on the distribu-
tion of words (analyzing keywords, extended lexical phrases, or collocations)
to identify textual features that are especially characteristic of an author or par-
ticular text.” Fischer-Starcke (2010) applied corpus stylistics into the analysis of
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, with the assistance of two corpora, one made
up of six novels by Austen, and the other of texts contemporary with Austen’s.
Her analysis shows how corpus tools can reveal textual linguistic features and
how these features affect the literary meanings of the texts. Thompson and Sealey
(2007) made a corpus-based comparison of children’s literature, adult literature,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003298328-1
2 Introduction
and newspaper texts and conducted a quantitative analysis of the most frequent
words and sequences of words. They found that adult and children fiction are
similar in some characteristics, but subtle differences also exist between them in
the frequency of some linguistic items, and that the differences between fictions
and news texts are apparent.
While many scholars pursue the application of computational and corpus lin-
guistics in the study of literature as creative writings (e.g., Mahlberg 2007, 2012,
2013; Mahlberg and McIntyre 2011; Mahlberg et al. 2013; McIntyre 2010), Baker
(2000) applied corpus methods in the analysis of literature as translations, a sub-
system to the system of literature. In her seminal study of translator’s style, she
defined translator’s style as “a kind of thumb-print that is expressed in a range of
linguistic – as well as non-linguistic – features . . . the preferred or recurring pat-
terns of linguistic behaviors, rather than individual or one-off instances of inter-
vention” (245). Saldanha (2011) argues that the stylistic features of a translation
are not just those of a translator but rather a combination of the linguistic choices
of the authors, translators, editors, and others who might have a role in the produc-
tion and revision of the translated text. She revised the definition of translator’s
style as:
[A] “way of translating” which (1) is felt to be recognizable across a range

of translations by the same translator, (2) distinguishes the translator’s work
from that of others, (3) constitutes a coherent pattern of choice, (4) is “moti-
vated,” in the sense that it has a discernable function or functions, and (5)
cannot be explained purely with reference to the author or source-text style,
or as the result of linguistic constraints.
(Saldanha 2011, 31)
Inspired by Baker (2000), many translation scholars applied corpus methods in the
investigations of translator’s style involving different languages (e.g., Bosseaux
2001, 2004; Winters 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2009, Li et al. 2011; Wang and Li 2011;
Chen and Li 2022).
As research advances on both fronts, that is, creative as well as translated lit-
erature, scholars have also made efforts to expand research topics and innovate
research designs. In order to capture the recent developments along these lines, an
online roundtable seminar was organized by the Centre for Studies of Translation,
Interpreting, and Cognition (CSTIC) of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Uni-
versity of Macau, at the end of 2020, with speakers from around the world. Due to
the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent travel restrictions, the seminar was
held online. Despite the rampage of the pandemic, the speakers of the roundtable
seminar spared no efforts to share their research on how corpora can be utilized
in the exploration of both original and translated literary texts. To celebrate these
new developments and to commemorate the remarkable research efforts despite
the pandemic, the editors of the present volume invited some speakers of the
roundtable seminar to develop their presentations into full-length chapters for
inclusion in this book. Besides, some additional leading and active researchers
Riccardo MORATTO and Defeng LI 3
were also approached to contribute with a chapter to this book. Therefore, the
present volume is the outcome of joint efforts of the speakers at the roundtable
seminar and those who were not able to partake the seminar but most generously
agreed to share their recent research with us.
This book consists of five chapters on the application of corpora to literary
studies and nine on the application of corpora to literary translation studies. To
facilitate reading, the abstracts of the authors will be presented in the following
passages as summary to each chapter.
In Chapter 1, Darryl Hocking and Paul Mounfort argue that recent years have
seen a proliferation in the diachronic analysis of narrative fiction. Using large
ready-made, digitized collections of fictional works, or smaller corpora compiled
by the researchers themselves, conclusions about developments in narrative fic-
tion traditionally emerge though a focus on the fictional text itself. This chapter
shows how the author interview, an increasingly pervasive genre in which authors
speak candidly about their writing practices, also has much potential for contrib-
uting to the understanding of diachronic change in narrative fiction. Using a self-
compiled corpus of interviews with fiction writers from the 1950s to the present
day, the chapter identifies, firstly, shifts in the way that contemporary authors
of narrative fiction have conceptualized their practices over time and, secondly,
the more salient conceptualizations of fiction writing that have emerged for each
decade since the 1950s.
In Chapter 2, Marianna Gracheva and Jesse A. Egbert show that authors vary
their language use according to the situational characteristics of individual texts
rather than simply their idiosyncratic preferences for certain language features,
by building on the results of a multidimensional analysis, which reveals consid-
erable within-author stylistic variation in modern literary nonfiction essays. In
particular, the study traces the relationship between communicative purpose and
stylistic choices made by authors across their works and shows that style reflects
functional considerations rather than only individual language attitudes. The find-
ings contribute to the field of corpus stylistics and have practical value for literary
analysis, translation, and creative writing, as they demonstrate that stylistic effects
achieved through strategic use of specific linguistic devices are closely associated
with the situation of use.
In Chapter 3, Pablo Ruano San Segundo uses a corpus-stylistic approach and
investigates the alleged influence of Charles Dickens on the style of the Spanish
novelist Benito Pérez Galdós. To do so, he has developed an annotation system
of Galdós’ novels to identify suspensions. A suspension is a protracted interrup-
tion by the narrator of a character’s speech. Stylistically speaking, suspensions
have received attention as one of the techniques typical of Dickens’ style. In this
chapter, Pablo Ruano San Segundo compares Dickens’ use of suspensions to that
of Galdós in Fortunata and Jacinta, the novel for which the Spanish novelist is
best known. The results show that there are patterns in form and function hitherto
unremarked in literary appreciations of Galdós’ style that show how the Spanish
novelist may have incorporated this device into his style to achieve similar effects
as those conveyed by Dickens.
4 Introduction
In Chapter 4, Guadalupe Nieto Caballero and Pablo Ruano San Segundo ana-
lyze Ruiz Zafón’s The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series using a corpus-stylis-
tic methodology. The authors look into how Zafón shapes narrative space in the
series. More specifically, they intend to show how certain aspects discussed by
literary critics are enacted in the same way throughout the series, thus unveiling
aspects of Ruiz Zafón’s craftsmanship hitherto unremarked in literary apprecia-
tions of his style. To do so, the authors have carried out a cluster analysis, with
which they have identified textual building blocks and analyzed them systemati-
cally. The analysis is meant to make a contribution to the still-emerging field of
corpus stylistics in Spanish, illustrating how the analysis of literary works can
benefit greatly from the use of innovative corpus tools.
In Chapter 5, Tak-sum Wong and John Sie Yuen Lee argue that information
extraction from historical text is challenging because of the lack of data to train
natural language processing tools. This chapter evaluates the utility of in-domain
training data for data-driven profiling of characters, verbs, and toponyms and
reports a case study on a corpus of Chinese Buddhist text. As is typical for such
a corpus, the Chinese Buddhist Canon has few annotated linguistic resources
other than names, places, and domain-specific terms. The authors apply a lexi-
con-based approach for named entity recognition and then report an analysis of
the “who,” “what,” and “where” of the Canon: who the characters were, what
they did, and where they were. Experimental results also show that even a small
amount of word segmentation, part-of-speech, and dependency annotation can
improve accuracy in named entity recognition and in extraction of character-verb
associations.
In Chapter 6, Titika Dimitroulia aims at discussing the use of corpora in liter-
ary translation practice, teaching, and research in the frame of the emerging field
of computer-assisted literary translation (CALT). Applied corpus-based transla-
tion studies (CBTS or CTS) have not extensively investigated so far the use
of corpora in literary translation practice and education, whereas in descriptive
CBTS, in which literary translation holds an eminent place, digital humanities
(DH) techniques that explore large corpora in innovative ways offer new per-
spectives in the study of the literary translation as a complex sociocultural dis-
cursive event at the heart of world literature. First, the author attempts an outline
of the use of corpora by professional literary translators during the translation
process, as reshaped by electronic tools, and draws their implications for liter-
ary translator education. Based on this, a number of new approaches to literary
translation in CBTS will be presented, casting light on translation’s complexity
and the potential of corpus analysis with the use of advanced techniques and
methodologies.
In Chapter 7, Yanfang Su and Kanglong Liu argue that in fiction, fictional dia-
logues are created with the purpose of character building, plot development, and
reader appeal. To achieve these purposes, the orality features present in fictional
dialogues are designed to mimic authentic conversations, which also pose great
challenges for translation. Previous studies have investigated how orality features
are translated in fictional dialogues. There is, however, a lack of quantitative anal-
ysis of representative orality features in existing studies of orality in fictional
dialogues. The objective of this study is to fill the research gap by comparing
orality in translated and non-translated fictional dialogues using a comparable
corpus design. To ensure a robust comparison of the two text types, the authors
made use of the linguistic features of dimension 1 in multidimensional analysis
approach together with the dimension score of the two text types. It was found
that both text types display an orality tendency toward the interactive texts, but
the dimension score for non-translated fictional dialogues was higher than that for
translated dialogues, and 11 out of the 28 linguistic features were more frequently
used in non-translated fictional dialogues. The study further explores possible
explanations for the different profiling between translated and non-translated fic-
tional dialogues.
In Chapter 8, Lorenzo Mastropierro explores the translation of repeated report-
ing verbs in the Harry Potter series in Italian. The author applies a multifacto-
rial approach to investigate whether and to what extent four factors, representing
linguistic features of the source text verbs, have an effect on the reproduction of
repetition in translation or its avoidance. The factors are (i) the frequency, (ii) the
number of possible translation equivalents, (iii) the number of different meanings,
and (iv) the semantic category of the source text verbs. This study moves beyond
the focus on the effects of avoiding repetition in literary translation, or on the
strategies used by translators to avoid repetition, as seen in the existing literature,
to provide instead a data-based and multidimensional description of the phenom-
enon itself in the context of reporting verbs.
In Chapter 9, Xinyi Zeng and John Sie Yuen Lee present a quantitative analy-
sis on a feminist translation of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The analysis
identifies distinctive translation strategies in the Chinese version of the novel
by Jie Tao, a prominent feminist translator, through comparison with the version
by Renjing Yang, who did not identify as feminist. The authors annotated 197
sentences in the novel in terms of their sexual content type and the translation
strategy adopted by Tao and Yang. Results show that the feminist version con-
stitutes a slightly more faithful translation, with more frequent use of explicit
translation strategies and less frequent use of conservative ones. Further, it
exhibits distinctive choices in translation strategy for different sexual content
types. The feminist perspective likely motivated the relatively explicit treatment
of references to private parts, body explorations, and female bodily phenomena
and relatively conservative treatment of rape, illicit relations, and stigma related
to virginity.
In Chapter 10, Ronald Jenn and Amel Fraisse describe how corpora-based DH
projects can bring together scholars from different fields, such as natural language
processing, information science, translation studies, and American studies with
equal benefits. This chapter uses Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a case in
point to explore the necessary steps to be taken and defines a number of criteria
to emulate other corpora-based interdisciplinary projects that would use literary
6 Introduction
texts. One important aspect is also the retrieval of existing scholarship on the
translated texts, allowing for wider multilingual approaches, significantly broad-
ening the scope of fine-grained textual analysis.
In Chapter 11, Kan Wu and Dechao Li investigate the extent to which English
translations of Chinese Wuxia fiction and Western heroic literature in modern Eng-
lish are stylistically similar through stylometric analyses. This chapter adds to lit-
erary translation research by highlighting possible stylistic connections between
heroic literature in the East and that in the West, clues that may help understand the
current reception of Wuxia translations. It also contributes to stylometric studies by
introducing the stylistic panorama, a novel concept proposed to describe the stylistic
picture of a (translated) text in a relatively holistic and functional way. Examin-
ing six English translations of Wuxia novels and 12 chivalric stories and heroic
fantasies in modern English, the study finds that the Wuxia translations differ from
the two Western subgenres in stylistic panoramas built by formal features (disper-
sion of word lengths, average sentence length, etc.), as well as the most frequent
words and the most frequent word sequences. Such differences have foregrounded
the unique stylistic features (richer Wuxia-specific vocabularies, shorter paragraph
lengths, etc.) of these translations, which has contributed in part to their favorable
reception among English-speaking readers. It is hoped that this study will encourage
new applications for the concept of stylistic panoramas in future stylometric studies.
In Chapter 12, Jing Fang and Shiwei Fu draw upon a parallel corpus of the
Chinese martial arts novel Legends of the Condor Heroes (射雕英雄傳) and pre-
sent a linguistic exploration of the English translation of personal reference used
in the novel. In particular, the examination focuses on the protagonist Guo Jing
(郭靖), investigating how the character makes reference to himself and to his
listeners in conversations, through which his personal trait of humbleness is por-
trayed. Reviews from English readers of the translation show that Guo’s humble-
ness has been successfully rendered in the translated text, despite the linguistic
disparity between the two languages that poses a challenge in translating personal
reference, which is a significant contributor to the portrayal of humbleness. By
examining and comparing the lexicogrammatical realization of personal refer-
ence in the source and the target texts, the authors try to explore how an equally
humble character is developed in the translation. Findings indicate that the trans-
lator’s choices in translating personal reference are closely related to the transla-
tor’s analysis of the social status of the characters, and the translator also uses
compensation strategies at both the microlevel of sentence and the macrolevel of
text to render an equivalent humble image in the target text. The study is expected
to shed light on how a pragmatically equivalent character could be developed in
translation when the two languages are culturally distant.
In Chapter 13, Kanglong Liu, Joyce Oiwun Cheung, and Riccardo Moratto
argue that the use of lexical bundles (LBs) has been affirmed to be a reliable
indicator of translators’ style as they can reveal the idiosyncrasies beyond the
use of words. Using LBs as an indicator, the authors investigate how fictional
dialogues in two full-length English translations of Hongloumeng diverge in style.
This corpus-assisted study is based on the first 80 chapters of two full-length
Hongloumeng translations, that is, one translated by the British sinologist David
Hawkes (who translated the first 80 chapters) and John Minford (who translated
the remaining 40 chapters), and the other co-translated by the Chinese translator
Xianyi Yang and his British wife, Gladys Yang. The results of the study show that
Hawkes used more tokens and types of LBs than did the Yang couple. Further
structural and functional analysis revealed that Hawkes overused verb phrases
and stance markers, whereas the Yangs overused prepositional phrases and refer-
ential markers. The divergences in style are discussed with reference to the trans-
lators’ language backgrounds, life experiences, and translation purposes.
In Chapter 14, Linping Hou and Defeng Li compare English translations of
metaphors in Lu Xun’s short stories translated by L1 and L2 translators, adopting
a corpus-assisted method. The patterns of the translation strategies were analyzed
within the framework of the relevance theory. The authors found that paraphras-
ing as a rendering strategy was used more frequently in translating culture-spe-
cific metaphors than culture-universal ones, and more recurrently in translating
conventional metaphors than creative ones. It suggested that more cognitive effort
was required to translate these conventional, culture-specific metaphors, typical
barriers in literary translation, to achieve optimal relevance. The authors also
found that L1 translators were more target-oriented in rendering the metaphors
than L2 translators, indicating an impact of translation direction on the translators’
performance. Finally, the present research testified the interplay of the two routes
(i.e., direct translation and indirect translation) in literary translation and demon-
strated that the interaction between the two routes was regulated by the principle
of relevance and modulated by such essential factors as the source input and the
translation direction.
In Chapter 15, Tak-sum Wong and Wai-Mun Leung provide a statistical
account and a contrastive study on the use of classifiers in historical Cantonese
and contemporary Cantonese documents. The authors have conducted a statistical
analysis of classifiers present in the Cantonese translations of the 1880s edition
and the 2010 edition of the four canonical gospels in the Christian New Testa-
ment; 94 classifiers are observed in the 2010 edition, but only 80 are found in the
1880s edition. The results show that while some classifiers have been used more
regularly since the nineteenth century, for example, kɔ33個 (a general classifier),
kin22件 “piece,” thiu11條 “strip,” tsɛk33隻 (mostly for counting animals and dolls),
and ti55 的/啲, the frequency of some classifiers in the 2010 edition drops drasti-
cally as a result of lexical replacement, for example, tat33笪 (for counting fields)
in place of fai33塊. The authors have also found that the reduction in frequency of
reduplicated classifiers is a result of changes in translation strategy rather than a
real reduction in usage in contemporary Cantonese.
We believe that such an international, dynamic, and interdisciplinary explora-
tion will provide valuable insights for anyone who wishes to have a better under-
standing of the relationship between corpora, literature, and literary translation.
We also believe it is appropriate to take this very opportunity to thank all the
contributors of this volume for their dedication and their efforts to produce their
best research and share it with the readers of the book.
8 Introduction
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1 Diachronic Trends in Fiction
Authors’ Conceptualizations
of their Practices
Darryl Hocking and Paul Mountfort
1.1 Introduction
In recent years, there has been a considerable increase in studies that investigate
diachronic corpora of narrative fiction in order to establish how fiction writing
has changed over time (McIntyre and Walker 2019). Many of these diachronic
analyses involve the development of researcher-compiled corpora and focus on
the stylistic evolution of individual authors, for instance, Hoover’s (2007) study
on the work of Henry James. Some, such as Klaussner and Vogel’s (2018), have
sought to compare diachronic shifts in style between individual authors, while
others examine broader stylistic developments over time in collections of authors’
works from a particular historical period. An early example of the latter can be
found in Biber and Finegan’s (1989) diachronic study of fiction writing, which
examines stylistic change in a small corpus of 33 English literary works from the
seventeenth century onward. Although identifying some pockets of resistance,
particularly in the eighteenth century, Biber and Finegan provide strong evidence
of a progression from a more elaborated and impersonal style in their fictional
texts toward one more characteristic of oral language.
With the growing access to large digitized collections of time-stamped histori-
cal texts of fictional works, for example Project Gutenberg or The Google Books
Corpus, the number of diachronic analyses of narrative fiction is further expand-
ing, as is the specific foci of the studies. Underwood (2019), for example, investi-
gates a corpus of English fiction drawn from the HathiTrust Digital Library from
1700 until the early twenty-first century. Among his observations, he finds that
over time fiction has increasingly become distanced stylistically from biographi-
cal and nonfictional texts, often the result of a growth in more concrete descrip-
tions of the human body, physical actions, and sensory perceptions. Underwood
also finds that since the 1700s, changes in the pacing of fictional works have
occurred, showing that in the average 250-word passage of an eighteenth century
novel, several days are likely to have passed, but by the twentieth century, a pas-
sage of a similar length will typically only describe a period of 30 minutes.
In another example, Sun and Wang (2022) use a 32,851 million token Google
Books subcorpus of English fiction from the 1820s to the 1990s to examine
whether the language of English fiction has tended toward the more concrete or
DOI: 10.4324/9781003298328-2
Diachronic Trends in Fiction Authors’ Conceptualizations 11
the more abstract. They find that, over the last two centuries, English fiction has
become increasingly concrete, and conclude that fiction today is less difficult to
read than it was in the nineteenth century. Also, using the English fiction dataset
of the Google Books corpus, but restricting their analysis to the years between
the 1900 and the 2000, Morin and Acerbi (2017) found that the presence of emo-
tional words significantly decreased in English fiction. To validate their findings,
however, they carried out a similar examination of two other smaller, self-built
corpora of English fiction and came to similar conclusions.
Rather than looking for more general diachronic trends, a number of studies
have targeted specific areas of diachronic development in narrative fiction, for
instance, Busse’s (2020) examination of how fictional characters’ thought and
speech are presented in nineteenth century fictional works, or Kung’s (2007) focus
on the word melancholy in pre-Romantic and Romantic British novels. Among
other findings, Kung found that melancholy is typically associated with reasoning
in the pre-Romantic period and emotion in the Romantic period.
These diachronic studies all develop their findings through a focus on the fic-
tional text itself. A related genre, however, which has untapped potential to con-
tribute to the analysis of diachronic change in narrative fiction, but whose focus
lies beyond the work, is the author’s interview. In interviews, authors generally
express a broad range of issues related to the conceptualization of their practices,
and given the marked proliferation since the 1950s of print and online publica-
tions containing interviews with fiction authors (e.g., Freiburg 1999), a further
opportunity is provided for the use of corpus-based analytical tools to examine
and identify shifting trends in fiction and fiction writing practice. Taking this
into account, this chapter uses a self-compiled corpus of interviews with fiction
authors, firstly, to identify diachronic changes in the way that these authors have
conceptualized their practices from the 1950s to the present day and, secondly, to
identify the more salient conceptualizations of fiction writing practice for each of
the decades since the 1950s. The chapter concludes by evaluating the potential
contribution of the artist interview to the quantitative analysis of fiction writing.
1.2 Methods
In order to investigate changes in the way that fiction authors have used language
to conceptualize their writing practices from 1950 until the present day, a trend
mapping analysis (Baker 2011; Stanyer and Mihelj 2016; Hocking 2022) and a dia-
chronic keyword analysis (Baker et al. 2013; Csomay and Young 2021) were carried
out on a 433,000-word diachronic fiction authors’ corpus (hereafter FAC), consisting
of interviews with fiction authors about their practices. Trend mapping identifies
words in a corpus that have exhibited statistically significant decreases or increases
in frequency over a particular period of time, while a diachronic keyword analysis
enables the identification of words found in a specific time period of a corpus that are
comparatively more frequent than those found in the rest of the corpus. In the case of
the FAC, trend mapping can provide insights into the wider shifts over time that have
occurred in fiction writers’ conceptualization of their practices, while a diachronic
12 Darryl Hocking and Paul Mountfort
keyword analysis can help reveal the salient conceptualizations of authors’ practices
during specific time intervals within the corpus. To carry out the analysis, the study
employed the Sketch Engine online corpus-analytical tool (Kilgarriff et al. 2014).
After providing a description of the FAC and the criteria used for its compilation, the
methods used to analyze the corpus will be discussed in more detail.
1.2.1 The Fiction Authors’ Corpus (FAC)

The FAC consists of 232 interviews with fiction authors from 1950 to the present.
The 1950s were selected as the earliest decade for the corpus due to the difficulty
of easily obtaining author interviews prior to this period. To facilitate a manage-
able analysis of trends, the FAC was divided into time intervals representing eight
calendar decades (Baker et al. 2013).
The texts in the corpus were located from online interviews, some from online
magazines, and others from print magazines reproduced online. Importantly, as the
focus of the corpus was on authors of fiction (i.e., novels and short stories), inter-
views with authors who primarily discussed, or whose oeuvre primarily involved,
poetry, theatre, essayist literature, or the writing of screenplays were excluded.
Furthermore, as all interviews were required to be in English, authors from Eng-
lish-speaking contexts were largely represented in the corpus. Nevertheless, inter-
views of authors whose first language was not English were still included if there
was no evidence that the interview had been translated from another language.
In order to specifically focus on the author’s conceptualization of their prac-
tices, the questions and comments of interviewers were omitted from the cor-
pus data. Moreover, where appropriate, sections of the interviews that explicitly
focused on the authors’ discussions of their personal history, rather than their writ-
ing practices, were also removed from the texts. The FAC is ethnically diverse and
includes emergent, mid-career, and late-career writers of fiction. While the latter
could be argued as conceptualizing their practice in ways representing earlier dec-
ades, we would suggest that like all creative individuals, their practices continue
to be influenced by conceptual shifts in the field.
Sketch Engine, the corpus tool used for the analysis, indicates that the FAC
contains 433,281 words. The size of the FAC was determined by the number of
suitable texts that could be obtained to represent each of the earlier decades, and
the decision that the later decades of the corpus should contain a corresponding
word frequency. Hence, to maintain the production of a reasonably sized corpus
yet prevent the stylistic peculiarities of any single author emerging as a general-
ity (McEnery et al. 2006), individual interviews were limited to 2,500 words.
The FAC might be criticized as a relatively small corpus (Aston 1997); how-
ever, small context-specific corpora are frequently viewed as advantageous for
the analysis of specialized language use (Bowker and Pearson 2002; Vaughan
and Clancy 2013), because the analyst is able to develop a familiarity with the
overall nature of the texts, which, along with their typically broad knowledge of
the context from which they arise, enhances the capacity to generate and interpret
findings (Aston 1997; Koester 2010). Details of the composition of the FAC can
Table 1.1 Word Composition of the FAC
Decade Words Percentage of Corpus Texts Average Words per Text
1950s 54,300 12.5 26 2,088

1960s 54,317 12.5 29 1,873
1970s 53,986 12.5 26 2,076
1980s 54,047 12.5 27 2,002
1990s 54,107 12.5 27 2,004
2000s 54,025 12.5 28 1,929
2010s 54,189 12.5 30 1,806
2020s 54,310 12.5 39 1,393
TOTAL 433,281 100 232 1,868
be seen in Table 1.1. Each time interval represents 12.5% of the corpus and con-
tains approximately 54,000 words.
1.2.2 Trend Mapping

Using the Trends tool in the corpus analytical software Sketch Engine, the trend
mapping analysis involved identifying those lemmas which exhibited statistically
significant (p-value ≤ 0.05) increasing or decreasing frequency trends over the
eight decades of the FAC. The tool uses the Theil-Sen estimator to provide a linear
approximation of the slope of the frequencies of an item over time by calculating
the medium slope between all individual pairs of frequency points. In the case of
this study, the analytical focus was on the lemma representing a particular part of
speech category (referred to as a lempos in Sketch Engine). In Sketch Engine, the
Theil-Sen slope is represented by a numerical value that identifies the direction
and magnitude of the trend. The Mann Kendall test is also employed to identify
the significance level of the trend statistic by providing a p-value. Further details of
Sketch Engine’s Trends tool can be found in Kilgarriff et al. (2015). Drawing upon
Baker (2011), Lazzeretti (2016), and Hocking (2022), it was also determined that
the trend analysis would only include those lemmas that occurred a minimum of
50 times in the corpus. Furthermore, it was also decided to only include those lem-
mas which exhibited a relatively strong slope over time. These were represented
by a trend value higher than 1 for increasing trends and less than -1 for decreasing
trends. These criteria resulted in 51 increasing or decreasing lemmas of interest.
1.2.3 Diachronic Keyword Analysis

Keywords are those words in a target corpus whose frequencies are unusually high
when set against the frequencies of the same words in a larger reference corpus
(McEnery et al. 2006). They are typically used to capture the overall “aboutness”
(Scott and Tribble 2006, 55) of a target corpus. Following Baker et al. (2013) and
Csomay and Young (2021), a diachronic keyword analysis, however, involves
establishing the keywords for a particular time interval within a diachronic cor-
pus by referencing that time interval against the rest of the corpus. This enables
the analyst to identify the aboutness of each particular time interval in the corpus,
which in the case of the FAC can indicate certain salient conceptualizations of
the fiction authors’ practices within successive decades. The diachronic keyword
analysis compliments the trend analysis, which focuses on increasing and decreas-
ing trends from the earlier time intervals of a corpus to the later time intervals. To
evaluate keyness, Sketch Engine uses a simple maths formula to establish a statistic
identifying the degree of keyness and then ranks the results (Kilgarriff 2009). As in
the trend analysis, the focus in the diachronic keyword analysis is on lemmas rep-
resenting a particular part of speech category. Furthermore, in order to ensure that
any key lemmas identified are substantively representative of the target decade and
not the result of repeated use by the producers of just a few texts in the corpus, the
keyword list for each decade only includes the top six key lemmas which occur in
at least one-third of all texts of the FAC. All keywords in the table are listed in order
of their keyness. Finally, in order to assist the diachronic analysis by facilitating an
analysis of the trend and diachronic keyword findings in context, the more conven-
tional, corpus-based tool of concordance analysis (Baker 2006) was also employed.
1.3 Results and Discussion

Table 1.2 provides a list of all upward-trending lemma in the FAC that meet the
criteria outlined in the previous section, while Table 1.3 provides a list of the
Table 1.2 High-Frequency Upward-Trending Lemmas in the FAC (freq. ≥ 50, p < 0.05)
Rank Word Part of Speech Trend Strength Freq. p-value
1 community noun 2.36 66 0.00930

2 space noun 2.05 100 0.00930
3 collection noun 2.05 54 0.01800
4 parent noun 1.88 75 0.00440
5 like adjective 1.60 71 0.03500
6 school noun 1.54 107 0.00190
7 kid noun 1.54 89 0.01800
8 grow verb 1.48 156 0.00930
9 relationship noun 1.48 121 0.03500
10 include verb 1.43 61 0.00930
11 experience verb 1.43 54 0.03500
12 need verb 1.38 260 0.00930
13 love verb 1.38 264 0.00930
14 also adverb 1.33 530 0.00930
15 family noun 1.33 186 0.00440
16 home noun 1.33 128 0.01800
17 her determiner 1.23 673 0.00930
18 allow verb 1.23 105 0.01800
19 narrative noun 1.23 85 0.01800
20 lot noun 1.19 559 0.00440
21 structure noun 1.11 110 0.00930
22 everyone noun 1.11 87 0.00930
Table 1.3 High-Frequency Downward-Trending Lemmas in the FAC (freq. ≥ 50, p < 0.05)
Rank Word Part of Speech Trend Strength Freq. p-value
1 technique noun -2.90 79 0.0093

2 critic noun -1.88 90 0.0180
3 modern adjective -1.73 57 0.0044
4 typewriter noun -1.66 54 0.0350
5 simply adverb -1.66 158 0.0044
6 play noun -1.66 102 0.0350
7 hero noun -1.60 70 0.0019
8 style noun -1.60 157 0.0350
9 unless conjunction -1.60 51 0.0350
10 use noun -1.60 50 0.0180
11 several adjective -1.60 63 0.0350
12 must modal -1.38 267 0.0093
13 deal noun -1.33 82 0.0180
14 business noun -1.33 82 0.0350
15 he determiner -1.23 2,005 0.0093
16 rewrite verb -1.19 54 0.0180
17 accept verb -1.19 76 0.0350
18 man noun -1.11 610 0.0019
19 matter noun -1.11 154 0.0350
20 himself determiner -1.11 145 0.0044
21 no – -1.07 860 0.0044
22 influence noun -1.07 66 0.018
23 great adjective -1.04 423 0.0350
24 begin verb -1.04 320 0.0093
25 yes – -1.00 441 0.0093
26 any – -1.00 612 0.0044
27 no adverb -1.00 167 0.0180
28 nothing noun -1.00 216 0.0093
29 James noun -1.00 67 0.0350
downward-trending lemmas. In both tables, the lemmas are ranked according to their
trend strength. The tables also show the part of speech, total frequency, and p-value
for each lemma. In order to foreground the wider and more consequential shifts over
time in fiction authors’ conceptualization of their practices, the following discussion
of these trend results is organized around four major themes, all of which consider
the association between particular upward- and downward-trending items. By con-
sequential we mean those shifts which appear to constellate within a larger pattern
and, as a result, may represent broader epistemological shifts in the discourse around
writing.
1.3.1 A Shift from Formal and Generic Influence Toward the

Possibilities and Subjectivity of Experience
A shift from formal concerns toward greater openness, experience, and multiple
exigencies is visible, for instance, in the declining use of technique, influence,
must, and simply versus the rising use of experience, include, allow, and also. In
the 1950s, technique is ubiquitous, occurring 32 times compared to only twice in
the 2010s, with the 1980s being the pivot to precipitous decline from 14 occur-
rences in the 1970s to only 3 in the 2020s. While technique may be framed sub-
jectivity (i.e., stemming from writers’ instincts or nature) and there are disavowals
of technique’s importance, the influence of particular books, authors, and literary
movements, or adjacent media such as poems, plays, and films, is frequently cited.
This is reinforced by the concomitant decline of influence, which peaked with 14
occurrences in the 1960s, where it is similarly deployed (“Jamesian influence,”
“Hemmingway’s influence,” etc.), as compared to only 4 occurrences per decade
for the 2010s and 2020s. Furthermore, there is a declining sense of imperative,
with use of the modal verb must halving by the 1990s from its 1960s peak, and to
a fifth in the last two decades. Use of the adverb simply declines concomitantly
from 41 in the 1950s to only 8 in the 2020s, perhaps signifying that notions of the
self-evident and straightforward can no longer be taken for granted.
By comparison, use of the verb experience has consistently grown from only
1 instance in the 1950s to 5 per decade in the 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, and 2000s,
with peaks of 9 in the 1980s, 10 in the 2021s, and 14 in the 2020s. The sole 1950s
example linked age and experience, while the 1960s through the 1990s, despite
often discussing experience in the literal sense, increasingly emphasize the role
of consciousness in shaping reality, pivoting in the 1980s toward acknowledging
heterodox ways of experiencing the world. By the twenty-first century, this sense
has bedded in, along with reference to the interior experiences of both fictional
characters and readers of the fictional work.
Consistent upward trending of the verbs include and allow, along with the
adverb also, suggests a similar “loosening up” of possibility. Include varied
between three to four usages from the 1950s through the 1980s before coming
to average almost triple that in the last four decades. It now frequently refers to
a variety of formative factors, including the role of an author’s life experience
in constructing a fictional work. Include can also connote inclusivity of choice
regarding a writer’s options in developing a narrative (“a story can be anything,
can include anything”). Usage of allow has quadrupled from the fifties through to
2020s and similarly suggests the multiplicity of affordances contemporary writers
enjoy (“you are allowed to practice your way and I’m allowed to practice mine”),
while also has risen from 22 instances in the 1950s through to 124 in the 2020s.
Its additive function may correlate with an increasing emphasis on being able to
contain contradictory impulses, such as “works that are full of energy but also full
of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence.”
1.3.2 A Shift from Stylistics to Structure and Contested Narratives

“Style and technique” are commonly collocated, with style, another of the top
10 downwardly trending terms, declining more than fourfold from 40 usages per
decade in the 1950s and 1960s to 8 today. As with technique, there are equivocal
views on certain styles (i.e., “the conventional conception”), dubiousness about
the very notion (“a fancy form of writing”), and associated notions of genre (“this
so-called style. I don’t know what they’re talking about ‘tough,’ ‘hard boiled’”).
There is a notable trend in the last two decades to frame style in terms of both con-
trivance (“a contrived style”) and heterodoxy (“each story brings its own style,”
“alter egos who wrote in distinct styles”), suggesting a postmodern shift toward
style as artifice rather than some essential attribute.
Modern also declines notably from 13 and 14 occurrences in the 1950s and
1960s, respectively, to 2 and 3 in the 2010s and 2020s. In the 1950s, it was com-
monly applied to literary genres, novels, and especially, writers. By the 2010s and
2020s, there are only two such usages, and one to do with “something that sounds
modern.” The use of the adjective great is also in serious retrenchment, from its
peak of 83 in the 1960s to 24 this decade. Though scattered references remain to
great “writers,” “stories,” “tales,” and “fiction,” there is increasing reference to
great “questions,” “mysteries,” “loves,” and “heartbreaks.” The inference would
be that, along with specific styles, modernism’s concern with canonical writers
and “great works” has lost currency to the demand for relatable content.
By comparison, structure and narrative are on the incline. The growth of the
former has been protean, increasingly fivefold from 1950 to 25 occurrences in
the 2020s. Structure was explicitly linked in the 1950s and 1960s to formalism,
including “form,” “logic,” “craft,” and “plan.” However, as early as the restive
1960s and 1970s, such overdetermination was increasingly questioned. Structure
is, instead, something that emerges from the unknown and “can’t be planned in
advance,” defying attempts at the “linear” and “well-defined.” The 1980s and
1990s go further, with writing itself imposing structure on reality, including
power structures which must be contested. Such usages continue, though in the
2000s there was increasing emphasis on storytelling structures, such as “story
structure,” “novelistic structure,” “Aristotelian structures,” and “folkloric struc-
tures.” Despite this, recent usage evidences a growing sense of the relativity and
multiplicity of narrative structure/s.
Use of narrative has doubled in frequency from 9 occurrences in the 1950s to
21 this decade, with a spike in the 1990s of 24 occurrences. The shift is from fairly
utilitarian deployment in the 1950s, often linked to “expositional and narrative
writing” and “narrative technique,” to a more explicit focus on voice and charac-
ters’ own conceptualizations about themselves, often pluralistic in nature (“nar-
rative points of view”). By the 2020s, there is increasing consciousness of how
narratives are used to frame and indeed construct fictional “realities” (“different
narrative[s],” “the nation’s narrative,” “a new kind of narrative”) and contesta-
tions of identity, such as gender and sexual orientation. Thus, we find mention of
“men controlling the narrative” and “straight narrative,” versus “women get[ting]
hold of the narrative,” “coming-out narratives,” and “trans narratives.”
1.3.3 Critics, the Business of Writing, and the Rise of Affect

Critic is the second steepest-declining lemma. The 1950s, with 37 occurrences,
were the critics’ heyday, a time when the profession was institutionalized in
literary broadsheets and practitioners acted as cultural arbiters. This declines by
approximately half per decade from the 1960s to the 1980s’ 5 instances. Brief
upticks to 7 per decade in the 1990s and 2000s were quickly effaced, with a slump
back to 5 occurrences again in the 2010s and only 1 in the 2020s. Ambivalence
toward critics has always been proverbial from authors, and a high proportion of
usages in the 1950s, despite acknowledgment of the critics’ job being to critique,
are negative. They stand variously accused of reading too much into a work, being
hard to please, having agendas, not listening, and being too fierce. However, such
disavowals prove that critical opinions or consensus mattered to, frequently irri-
tated, and sometimes wounded writers. This ambivalence carries on – one choice
phrase from the 1960s describes “a certain type of critic, the ferrity, human-inter-
est fiend, the jolly vulgarian,” while a 1970s writer impugns their willful refusal
“to see what [their] books are really about” – until the nadir of the term.
By the 1980s we find mention of the limitations of the author as critic of their
own work, and in the 2010s, the need to outrun the “inner critic” along with men-
tion of the particular tastes of “gay readers and critics,” while the sole usage in
the 2020s is a writer claiming they were “able to be [their] own critic.” In other
words, criticism came to be discussed less in terms of external recognition and
more with regard to intrinsic factors and fitness for target readerships. Perhaps
concomitantly, framing writing in terms of business has also declined from peaks
of 16 and 19 in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively, to just under 7 per decade from
the 1980s to today. Business occurs most frequently to mean the work of writing,
with occasional reference to the “business plan” and publishers as “businesspeo-
ple,” among more general references to “this business of roots and stories” and
“the business of living.”
Against these declines, a raft of subjectively toned words connoting positive,
even passionate, engagement are in the ascendency, such as feels, open, wanted,
love, and felt. Space does not permit sustained unpacking here, but it can be noted
that feels has tripled this century from 8 uses in the 2000s to 24 in the 2020s, where
it has come to foreground the feelings of writers, characters, and readers in relation
to critical issues. Metonymic of this wider shift, “the idea that there’s somehow
less art in writing that feels close to the bone is just an old, ancient, disempowering
story.” This affective turn or “structure of feeling,” as Williams (1977, 133) put
it, is reflected in similar if less-steep inclines for wanted and felt. Wanted is very
frequently used now in relation to writers’ priorities when developing work (i.e., [I]
wanted “to explore,” “to write,” or “speak” about, to “focus on,” “to capture,” “to
show,” “to suggest,” “to defamiliarize”), while felt connotes a growing emphasis
on writers’ self-reflexivity toward their own work ([it] felt “so enormous,” “more
urgent and true,” “productive,” “subversive!” “limited,” “more apolitical,” etc.).
Arguably, then, affective concerns have displaced hierarchical impositions from the
outside, whether critical or prescriptive, of how writers conceptualize their “work.”
1.3.4 Centrality of Community and Space

Cumulatively, these shifts would appear to reconfigure earlier formalist concerns
with technique and style that are hedged around with imperative toward more
holistic conceptualizations of the writing process and its social context. Argu-
ably, this culminates in a major shift toward the foregrounding of community
and space, the first and third upward-trending terms in the corpus, respectively.
The rise in usage of community has been meteoric – from a couple of instances
in the 1960s and 1970s to 23 this decade. A spike in the 1980s, particularly in
relation to ethnic communities, fan cultures, and “the gay community,” has pre-
figured its increasing mobilization since then. We find many such increasingly
heterodox usages this century, from the “Jewish/communist anarchist/commu-
nity,” “the Māori community,” and “Bronson Alcott’s failed utopian community,”
to the “radical feminist alternative community” and “the queer community.” Such
communities are sometimes the subject of literary works or allude to the writer’s
cultural background but may also be the sites in, or for, which the works are
produced.
Space has also risen from similar obscurity in the 1950s and 1960s to 25
instances in the 2010s and 31 this decade. In the 1970s, there is an almost-perfect
split in its 12 occurrences between “outer space” and “inner space, psychologi-
cal space,” a dichotomy that persists through the 1980s. By the 1990s space is
increasingly to do with gaps and ellipses, including spatial layout; a narrator’s
“own demands for space” also figures. These uses intensify in the 2000s, from
the need for “space for the imagination,” to the inherent politics of space (“those
spaces of silence that exist in Nigerian literature”). In the 2010s, both these trends
are extended via discussion of “spaces within novels” and “the idea that there
exist multiple and distinct cultural and racial spaces.” By the 2020s we have a
plethora of usages, from “female,” “feminist,” “gendered,” and “queer” spaces to
“weird,” “tonal,” “emotional,” “online,” “coworking,” and “safe” spaces. Despite
the fact that community and space do not specifically collocate in the corpus, the
terms do appear to be complementary in suggesting sites for the production and
circulation of literature that are less prescriptive in terms of formalist concerns
and more rooted in the context of diverse communities, along with the affordances
their associated spaces – literal and conceptual – provide.
1.3.5 Diachronic Keyword Analysis

Tables 1.4 to 1.8 provide an indication of the top keywords for each decade of
the corpus. As indicated previously, to ensure that all lemmas identified as key
are particularly representative of the target decade, they must occur in at least
Table 1.4 1950s Keywords
Rank Lemma POS Freq. Keyness FPM 1950s FPM Rest Doc Freq. Focus
1 critic noun 37 3.1 592.56 121.15 16

2 technique noun 32 3.0 512.48 107.43 10
3 hero noun 29 2.9 464.44 93.72 10
4 simple adjective 24 2.5 384.36 91.43 11
5 play noun 32 2.4 512.48 160.00 10
6 ought modal 15 2.3 240.23 48.00 9
1 must modal 72 2.3 1,152.15 445.77 23

2 power noun 31 2.2 496.06 166.88 10
3 man noun 150 2.2 2,400.31 1,051.57 24
4 picture noun 23 2.2 368.05 116.59 11
5 country noun 45 2.0 720.09 306.33 15
6 style noun 40 2.0 640.08 267.46 13
1 serious adjective 25 2.4 399.99 112.02 9

2 author noun 37 2.1 591.98 233.18 15
3 paper noun 23 1.9 367.99 141.74 13
4 fiction noun 96 1.9 1,535.95 768.12 17
5 terribly adverb 13 1.9 207.99 64.01 10
6 money noun 22 1.9 351.99 141.74 11
1 basically adverb 16 2.4 255.07 48.03 10

2 moral adjective 27 2.3 430.42 132.66 12
3 large adjective 29 2.1 462.31 164.68 16
4 imagination noun 26 1.9 414.48 171.54 10
5 beyond preposition 14 1.8 223.18 77.77 11
6 rather adverb 54 1.8 860.85 432.29 16
1 face noun 16 2.1 255.89 68.59 10

2 act noun 24 2.1 383.83 130.31 9
3 voice noun 52 2.1 831.64 349.79 10
4 talk noun 14 1.8 223.90 77.73 9
5 English adjective 21 1.7 335.85 153.18 10
6 truth noun 25 1.7 399.83 192.04 13
one-third of all interviews from that decade. This document frequency statistic
is found in the final column. The tables also provide the keyness score for the
lemma, as well as their frequency and frequency per million for the target decade,
and frequency per million for the rest of the FAC.
The keywords for the 1950s reinforce the earlier trend analysis. For example, the
modal ought (“the writer ought to help the reader as much as he can”) aligns with
the modal must, which, as indicated previously, frames practices of fiction writing as
constituted by certain obligatory actions and values (“the writer must be disengaged,
or else he is writing politics”). It is also notable that while hero figures prominently
here, it ranks seventh in terms of overall decline (from 29 in the 1950s to 2 in the
2020s), with frequent ambivalence toward the notion, even in the 1950s, culminat-
ing in the practical redundancy of the term in today’s conversations around fiction.
The frequency of the proclamatory must is at its apex in the 1960s, but what is
of particular related interest here is fiction writers’ obsession with power, either
to conceptualize their own writing as associated with a sense of personal power
(“people tend to underestimate the power of my imagination,” “it lies within our
power, as writers . . . to do something for others”) or as a motivating concern
for their writing (“I think there is no question that power is a great temptation”).
Perhaps concomitantly, man is a term that rides high in the 1960s but is one of a
number of male-gendered lemma from the corpus, others being he and himself,
that are in sharp overall decline.
Widespread use of the adjective serious prefixing such terms as “story,”
“novel,” “work,” “fiction,” “audience,” and “film critics” lends literary matters
considerable gravitas in the 1970s. Concomitantly, this is the only decade where
author occupies the top six key lemmas, with interviewees often talking about
“an author” or “the author” in generic terms (“the author’s voice”). Fiction is
used largely descriptively to refer to the mega-genre of prose storytelling but
can increasingly stand in for a “novel” or “story” (“every middle-class fiction
is basically a story of adultery,” “the strange amorphous fictions of Barthes and
Robbe-Gillet”) in a way suggestive of a postmodern turn toward framing stories
as fictions.
Adverbs and adjectives dominate the 1980s keywords, with broad-sweeping
terms, such as the essentializing basically, intensifier rather, and the aggrandiz-
ing large lavished over the decade of excess. At a time when relativists faced off
against social conservatives, the term moral retains force but is often inflected
with doubt, irony, or even derision (“the moral code of the middle-class writer”).
For the first time, writing as a product of imagination, which also engages that of
readers, becomes a discernible concern.
The 1990s’ key lemmas are particularly interesting for their shared semantic
relationships with representation, in a decade when meaning making was increas-
ingly understood as performative. Act is used to refer to both the act of writ-
ing, the mimetic acting out of roles, and the multitudinous acts of “love,” “lust,”
“hate,” “indifference,” “violence,” “despair,” “manipulation,” and “hope.” Talk
may refer to attending talks, speaking voices and idiolects (“this guy talk voice”),
and discourse (“talk about”) around issues critical to writers and writing. Voice
can refer literally to how people speak, but also differing narrative voices, includ-
ing points of view (POVs) within fictional works, and the concerns writers give
voice to. These mediating factors frequently complicate the notion of unitary truth
(“I shall argue with you about your interpretation of the truth”).
In the 2000s, landscape becomes a concern in senses cinematic (being “just
as important as the [human] figures”), psychogeographic (“the emotional
1 landscape noun 19 2.4 303.12 70.90 10

2 boy noun 30 2.3 478.61 150.94 14
3 pleasure noun 21 2.2 335.02 96.05 13
4 recently adjective 16 2.0 255.26 77.76 14
5 kid noun 24 1.9 382.89 148.66 13
6 hope noun 12 1.8 191.44 66.32 9
1 perspective noun 17 2.3 271.84 61.73 10

2 childhood noun 18 2.2 287.83 75.45 10
3 draft noun 40 2.1 639.62 246.92 12
4 art noun 49 2.0 783.54 336.08 14
5 research noun 20 2.0 319.81 107.45 10
6 kid noun 23 1.9 367.78 150.89 10
landscape”), and with regard to the literary landscape itself, the metaphor likely
owing its rise to an increasingly visual and multimodal culture. Boy and kid
often relate to writers’ own upbringings, but the focus on adolescent charac-
ters may be connected to the growth in young adult (YA) literature. A spike
in abstract nouns pleasure and hope – the first often applying to the “particu-
lar, private pleasure” of both text and writing, the second finely balanced with
hopelessness (“hopes and desires for what we want the world to look like”) –
perhaps reflects a decade in which multiple existential threats to civilization
became visible.
Several ranked nouns suggest increasingly conscious engagement with the
act of writing. Perspective functions both in regard to characterological POVs
(e.g., “the ‘god’ perspective”), but also heterodox ways of seeing (“a variety of
voices from all different perspectives”). Draft connotes concern with process and
reworking material multiple times. Interestingly, art is used less often to refer to
writing than related visual arts, but it is notable that, as in visual arts (Hocking
2022), research has increasing currency in creative writing praxis, though some-
times in disavowal (“I try to do as little research as possible when writing” and
“research deadens fiction.”) Complementary to the 2000s, kid is again on the rise,
as is childhood, for related reasons.
It is striking that identity is the top trending lemma in a decade when identar-
ian concerns are very much part of public discourse. It is no surprise, then, to see
it used directly after possessives such as “their,” “your,” and “me,” connoting
ownership, and to heterodox identity markers (e.g., “gay,” “racial,” “marginal,”
and “hybrid”). Whereas male-gendered terms are falling in use, her is on the rise.
1 identity noun 25 3.3 403.08 50.24 13

2 family noun 64 3.0 1,031.88 278.60 19
3 parent noun 27 2.6 435.32 109.61 13
4 her determiner 180 2.4 2,902.15 1,125.80 30
5 space noun 31 2.3 499.81 157.57 17
6 figure verb 17 2.3 274.09 66.22 13
Complementary to these shifts, space is a key term. As discussed in Section 1.3.4,

it clearly now denotes both literal and more abstract zones within which these
newly empowered identities, and their associated communities, can contest their
corner. Figure is most commonly collocated with “out,” reinforcing the sense of a
time when meaning is not set but is being contested both through the act of writing
and outside of the boundaries of the text, as if to say, “We are still figuring it out.”
1.4 Conclusion
Using a self-compiled diachronic corpus of interviews with narrative fiction
authors from the 1950s until the present day, this chapter has identified four major
thematic trends in their conceptualizations around their literary practices. In gen-
eral, they suggest shifts from formalist concerns to more holistic conceptualiza-
tions of the writing process and its social context. Of course, there are nuances
within this broad arc, such as the declining influence of technique and style set
against rising and increasingly polymorphous conceptualizations of structure and
narrative. Additionally, the study identified the more salient conceptualizations
of fiction writing practice for each of the decades since the 1950s. It was shown
that obligatory pressures associated with the powerful demands of cultural arbi-
ters have given way to writers’ more affective engagement with identity, creative
process, and heterodox readerships. Given how these findings chime with widely
identifiable trends in our cultural moment, we hope to have shown that the artist
interview has considerable potential to contribute to the quantitative analysis of
fiction writing.
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2 Within-Author Style Variation
in Literary Nonfiction
The Situational Perspective
Marianna Gracheva and Jesse A. Egbert
2.1 Introduction
Studies of style focus on consistent patterns in an author’s works with the goal
of revealing pervasive trends in their language use. It has been observed, how-
ever, that style is not uniform, but a single author displays varying degrees of
versatility across their works. Often, such versatility is associated with evolution
of style over time. Hoover (2007), for example, examines Henry James’s style
diachronically, identifying pervasive vocabulary in 20 of his novels, and distin-
guishes between substyles within them as well as James’s early, intermediate, and
late stylistic trends. Moss (2014) performs a diachronic analysis of James’s syntax
in two novels and finds increased syntactic complexity in non-dialogic sections
of his later work.
It does not seem common, however, for such studies to identify reasons for this
variation other than the effect of time. Biber and Conrad (2019, 16) note that research
on style is primarily concerned with the aesthetic value of linguistic choices, which
are “not directly functional.” In fact, functional underpinnings of these choices are
often seen as either irrelevant or impossible to identify. Discussing James’s fre-
quent use of pronouns without clear referents, for example, Moss (2014, 78) notes
that “sometimes James uses these stylistic devices without clear reasons, apparently
mimicking the pattern set by those sentences in which such unusual structures have
been meaningful,” thus suggesting that there is essentially no functional reason for
this use and it is purely idiosyncratic. The same idea is expressed in her statement
regarding sentence length: “No reason has been identified for the relatively short
clauses . . . ; it seems simply to be a stylistic variation” (Moss 2014, 173).
It is possible, however, that language produced with attention to aesthetics at the
same time fulfills certain communicative functions. In their synchronic study of
eighteenth-century fiction and essays, Biber and Finegan (1994, 13–4) demonstrate
that a method based on systematic functional co-occurrence of linguistic features
(multidimensional analysis) can be applied to stylistic analysis. To this end, the
styles of Johnson, Addison, Defoe, and Swift are analyzed with respect to three
dimensions of variation identified by Biber (1988): “informational vs. involved
production” (preference for nominal [informational] features vs. clausal ones, char-
acteristic for spoken, more involved discourse), “elaborated vs. situation-dependent
DOI: 10.4324/9781003298328-3
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“What do you mean?” asked the girl, turning white at the young
man’s tone.
“If you’ll promise to marry me—seriously, mind—I’ll persuade my
father not to build the new tower to St. Cuthbert’s. Nobody but me
can stop him. That chap Mitchell is egging him on to it with all his
might.”
“He’s changed his mind,” said Olivia, quietly.
“Oh, has he? Since when, I should like to know? He met me sitting
here five minutes ago, on his way down to St. Cuthbert’s, where
you’ve just come from” (with another knowing nod), “and he gave me
this note for my father. I opened it. Won’t you read it? All right; but
you shall hear what it says.”
Fred was holding a part of the old envelope, which had been
scribbled on in pencil and folded. He read it aloud:—
“Dear Mr. Williams—Hurry on the rebuilding of St.
Cuthbert’s Tower as fast as you can. I hear there is a
proposal afloat to be beforehand with you, and to deprive
you of all the credit of the thing by getting it up by
subscription.—Yours, E. Mitchell.”
Poor Olivia was aghast at Ned’s breach of faith, but she affected
unconcern.
“I don’t see how the rebuilding of St. Cuthbert’s tower can affect
either me or Mr. Vernon Brander.”
“Nor do I. But I can see it does. Anyhow, I’ll give you till to-morrow
morning to consider the thing, and I’ll meet you in the poultry run
when you feed the chickens—if I can get up early enough. And as I
see you want to think over it by yourself, I’ll take myself off for the
present. Good-evening, Miss Denison.”
He sauntered away in the opposite direction to Rishton, his
mischievous good humor perfectly undisturbed; while Olivia, more
concerned for Mr. Vernon Brander than ever, hurried home, and
sneaked up to her room to consider the new position of affairs, and
to write a pleading note to Ned Mitchell.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Olivia Denison’s thoughts on the morning after the haymaking,
were entirely occupied with Vernon Brander, his illness, the
possibility of his innocence, and the chances of his escape if guilty;
so that when, on entering the poultry yard with her basket on her
arm, she found Fred Williams, amusing himself by setting two cocks
to fight each other, she uttered a cry of unmistakable annoyance and
astonishment.
“You look as if you hadn’t expected to see me, and as if, by Jove,
you hadn’t wanted to!” said he, frankly. As she made no answer, but
only raised her eyebrows he went on—“Don’t you remember I said I
should be here this morning?”
“I had forgotten it, or only remembered it as a kind of nightmare.”
“Do you mean me to take your rudeness seriously?” asked Fred,
after a pause in which he had at last struggled with the amazing fact
that he had met a girl to whom his admiration, and all the glorious
possibilities it conveyed, meant absolutely nothing.
“As seriously as I have always taken yours.”
Fred was silent again for some moments, during which Olivia went
on throwing handfuls of grain to the chickens, and calling softly
“Coop-coop-coop-coop!” in a most persuasive and unconcerned
manner.
“And you really mean that this is your last answer? I can tell you, it’s
your last chance with me?”
Olivia turned, making the most of her majestic height, and looked
down on him with the loftiest disdain.
“I assure you that if it were my ‘last chance,’ as you call it, not only
with you, but with anybody, I should say just the same.”
Fred Williams leaned against the wall of the yard, turned out the
heterogeneous contents of one of his pockets, and began turning
them over with shaking fingers to hide his mortification.
Still Olivia went on with her occupation, without paying the slightest
attention to him. Suddenly the rejected suitor shovelled all the things
he had taken out back into his pockets, and with a monkey-like
spring placed himself right in front of her.
“I wish there was somebody about to tell you what a jolly fool you’re
making of yourself,” he said, looking up at her rather viciously.
“You may go and fetch somebody to do so if you like,” said she,
serenely.
“And leave you in peace for a little while, I suppose you mean?”
“Perhaps some such thought may have crossed my mind.”
Mr. Fred Williams had not a high opinion of himself, but experience
had taught him that his “expectations” gave him an adventitious
value; to find neither his modesty nor his money of any avail was a
discovery which destroyed for once his habitual good humor, and
showed a side of his character which he should by all means have
kept concealed from a lady he wished to charm.
“Very well,” he snarled, while an ugly blush spread over his face, and
his fingers twitched with anger; “very well. You may think it very
smart to snub me, and high-spirited and all that. I’ve stood a good
deal of it—a good deal more than I’d have stood from anybody else
—because you’re handsome. I know I’m not handsome, or refined
either; but I don’t pretend to be. And I’m a lot handsomer than the
hatchet-faced parson, anyhow. And as for refinement, you can get a
lot more for twenty-five thousand a year than for a couple of
hundred, which is quite a decent screw for one of your preaching
fellows. But now I’ve done with you, I tell you, I’ve done with you.”
“Isn’t that rather a singular expression, considering that I’ve never
given you the slightest encouragement?” asked Olivia, coldly.
“Encouragement! I don’t expect encouragement; but I expect a girl
like you to know a good thing when she sees it.”
“I am afraid we differ as to what constitutes a good thing.”
“Very likely; but we shan’t ‘differ as to what constitutes’ a bad thing
for Vernon Brander; and if you don’t see all those twopenny
geraniums pulled up out of St. Cuthbert’s churchyard, and every
stone grubbed up, and every brick of that old tower pulled down,
before another week’s up, my name’s not Fred Williams. There, Miss
Denison; now, what do you say to that?”
“I say that you have fully justified your low opinion of yourself.”
“And I’ll justify my low opinion of Vernon Brander. If he’s got any
secrets buried in those old stones, we’ll have them dragged out, and
make you jolly well ashamed of your friend.”
“Oh, no, you won’t do that,” said Olivia, who had turned pale to the
lips, and grown very majestic and stern; “though you have
succeeded in making me ashamed of having called you even an
acquaintance.”
“Perhaps you have a weakness for—”
Before he could finish his sentence, he found himself seized by the
shoulders, and saw towering over him a beautiful countenance, so
aglow with passionate indignation that it looked like the face of a
Fury.
“If you dare to say that word I’ll shake you like a rat!” hissed out
Olivia, giving him an earnest of her promise with great good will.
“Stop! stop! unless you—want—to—kill somebody—to be more—like
—your—precious—friend,” panted Fred, who was not a coward.
Olivia let him go with a movement which sent him spinning among
the chickens.
“Well, that’s cool,” panted he, as he picked up his hat and looked at it
ruefully. “You talk about refinement one minute and the next you treat
me in this unladylike way!”
“Oh, I apologize for my vulgar manners,” laughed Olivia, who was
already rather ashamed of her outbreak. “I’m only a farmer’s
daughter, you know.”
“Yes, and you couldn’t give yourself more airs if you were a duchess.
Your father isn’t so proud by a long way, I can tell you,” he added
with meaning.
Olivia became in an instant very quiet.
“What do you mean?” she asked sternly.
“Oh, nothing but that he’s been in the habit of borrowing money of
me for some time; only trifling sums, but still they seemed to come in
handy, judging by the way he thanked me.”
He was disappointed to see that Olivia took this information without
any of the tragic airs he had expected.
“I daresay they did,” said she. “We are not too well off, as everybody
knows.”
The simplicity with which she uttered these words made the young
man feel at last rather ashamed of himself.
“Of course, I know he’ll pay me back,” he said hastily.
Olivia opened great proud eyes, full of astonishment and disdain,
and said, superbly, “Of course he will.”
“And you don’t feel annoyed at the obligation, eh?” asked Fred,
rather bewildered.
“I don’t see any obligation,” said she quietly.
“Oh, don’t you? Well, most people would consider it one.”
“How much does he owe you?”
“Oh, only a matter of forty or fifty pounds.”
He thought the amount would astonish and distress her; but as,
apparently, it failed to do either, he hastened to add—
“Of course, that’s a mere nothing; but he let me know, a day or two
ago, that he should want a much larger loan, and of course, I
informed him he could have it for the asking.”
She did wince at that; but the manner in which she resented his
impertinence was scarcely to his taste.
“And you think the obligation is on our side?” she said, sweetly, but
with a tremor of subdued anger in her voice. “What have you done
except to lend my father a few pounds, which you would never have
missed, even if you had thrown them into a well instead of lent them
to an honorable man! While he, by accepting the loan, has given you
a chance of putting on patronizing airs towards a man in every
respect your superior.”
“All right—all right! Go on! Vernon Brander shall pay for this!” snarled
Fred, at last rendered thoroughly savage by her contempt.
“Vernon Brander will never be the worse for having you for an
enemy. I should be sorry for him if you were his friend,” she said,
defiantly.
“Oh, all right, I’m glad to hear it,” said Fred, glad at last to beat a
retreat, and delivering his parting words at the gate of the poultry
yard, with one foot in the new-laid egg basket. “Then if anything
unpleasant happens to your father or your parson through me, you’ll
be able to make light of it!”
Olivia felt rather frightened when she saw how discolored and
distorted with rage his little weasel’s face had become. But she bore
a brave front, and only said, for all reply to his threats—
“Won’t you find it more convenient to stand on the ground, Mr.
Williams? To walk about among eggs without accident requires a
great deal of skill and experience.”
But when, with an impatient exclamation, he left the poultry yard,
Olivia’s heart gave way, and she began to reproach herself bitterly
for not having kept a bridle upon her tongue. On the other hand, she
was glad that her words had provoked the mean little fellow to
confess his loans to her father; for she thought she had influence
enough with the latter to prevent any more such transactions, and as
for the money already owing, means must somehow be found to
repay it.
It was late in the afternoon before she was able to start on the way to
St. Cuthbert’s. She felt, as usual, some self-reproach at the thought
that she was acting contrary to her father’s wishes; but, as usual,
she was too self-willed to give up her own in deference to his. The
sun was still glowing on the fields, and pouring its hot rays on the
roads, which were parched and cracked for want of rain. The cart-
tracks made faint lines in a thick layer of white dust, which the
lightest breeze from the hills blew up in clouds, coating the leaves on
the hedges and swirling into heaps by the well-worn foot path. The
wood that bordered the road for some distance between Rishton and
Matherham was as silent as if the birds had all left it; oak and beech
and dusty pine looked dry and brown in the glare. It was a long, hot,
weary walk; but at last she came near the lonely Vicarage, and
slipping down the final few yards of the steep lane, in a cloud of dust
which was raised by her own feet at each step, Olivia heard the faint
sound of voices coming from the house, and stopped short, fancying
she could detect Vernon’s voice, and wondering who was with him.
But the sounds ceased, and she went slowly on, thinking she had
perhaps been mistaken. She entered the garden gate, and walked
up the stone pathway, still without hearing anything more, until,
suddenly, just as she was within a few paces of the door, she heard
a woman’s voice, low, but clear and strong, utter these words—
“Remember, you swore it. Ten years ago you swore it to me, and it is
still as binding on you as it was then.”
“Why should I forget it?”
Olivia knew that it was Mrs. Brander’s voice that answered, in a tone
full of contempt and dislike—
“Why, this Denison girl, this——”
Neither she nor Vernon had paid any heed to the footsteps on the
stone flags.
Now Olivia hastened to ring the bell sharply, and there was silence
immediately.
“How is Mr. Brander to-day?” asked she of Mrs. Warmington when
the housekeeper opened the door.
“He’s not much better, and not likely to be while that uncivilized
creature from the Antipodes continues to make his abode here, and
worry my master morning, noon, and night,” said the housekeeper,
tartly.
“Mr. Mitchell? Where is he now?” asked Olivia, eagerly.
“He’s out in the churchyard there, poking about among the
gravestones. I’ve been watching him from the window of the little
room he sleeps in. I don’t know how he got hold of the key. I have a
duplicate, for cleaning the church. I don’t know myself where my
master keeps his.”
“I think I’ll go and speak to Mr. Mitchell, and come back when Mr.
Brander is disengaged.”
“Disengaged! He’s disengaged now, as far as I know——”
“I think I heard Mrs. Brander’s voice as I came up the path.”
The housekeeper’s lips tightened, and she drew herself up in evident
disapproval.
“Indeed! I was not aware she was here.”
“Well, I’ll be back in about a quarter of an hour, as I should like to
see Mr. Brander,” said Olivia, hastily.
Mrs. Warmington raised her eyebrows. She was longing to tell Miss
Denison that she thought, under the circumstances, it would be more
modest to stay away; but she did not dare. So Olivia tripped down
the stone path, and was in the churchyard before the housekeeper
had had time to make up her mind how much of her suspicions it
would be proper to communicate to a young girl.
It was some minutes before Olivia succeeded in finding Ned Mitchell.
The sun was setting by this time, and there were dark shadows
among the ruined portions of the church. It seemed to her as she
walked between the newly laid out flower beds with their bright array
of geranium, calceolaria, and verbena, that this innovation was out of
place, and only showed up, in a more striking manner, the havoc
time and tempest had made among the old stones, just as the
mowing of the grass upon them had accentuated the irregular
mounds and hillocks which filled the ruined south aisle. Olivia
stepped in and out and over the mounds, calling softly, “Mr. Mitchell!”
At last, in the corner where the old crypt was, she heard a sound
coming, as it were, from the ground under her feet. She stopped and
listened, holding her breath. The sounds continued, a soft, muffled
“thud, thud,” as of some heavy instrument brought again and again
down on the earth. She advanced, step by step, always listening,
fancying that she felt the ground tremble under her feet at the force
of the blows. At last she came close to the place where the rugged
steps leading down into the crypt had been blocked up years before.
With her senses keenly on the alert, Olivia noticed that some of the
stones and earth which blocked the entrance had been recently
moved; and prying more closely, she found, behind a bramble and a
tuft of rank grass, a small hole, low down in the ground, which looked
scarcely large enough for the passage of a man’s body. However,
this seemed to be the only outlet from the vault, so Olivia sat down
on a broken gravestone, and waited.
It seemed to Olivia to be growing quite cold and dark before a
scraping and rumbling noise, as of falling stones and earth, drew her
attention to the concealed hole in the ground. She got up, and the
noise almost ceased.
“It is I, Mr. Mitchell,” she said, without being able to see him; “I’ve
been waiting for you.”
For answer, Mr. Mitchell’s unmistakable, gruff voice murmured a
string of sullen imprecations, of which, luckily, nothing was distinctly
audible. However, he put his head out of the hole, and then
proceeded to extricate the whole of his person with such exceeding
neatness and cleverness that the hole was scarcely enlarged, and
the bramble and grass remained intact. He presented a strange
appearance, however, for he was in his shirt sleeves; a colored silk
handkerchief was bound round his head down to his eyes; in his
right hand he held a common kitchen poker; while he was so
covered with mould and dust from head to foot that but for his
peculiarly heavy movements and rough voice he would have been
unrecognizable.
“Well, what are you doing here?” he asked, very ill-humoredly, as he
shook himself free from some of the dust he had collected in his
subterranean exploration. “I thought I heard somebody messing
about up here. How did you get in?”
“In the same way that you did, except that I asked for a key instead
of taking one without asking.”
She was alarmed to see, when he had wiped some of the dirt off his
face with his handkerchief, that he looked savagely self-satisfied,
and quite beyond all reasoning. This was proved clearly by his next
words. He nodded his head quietly while she spoke, and then said—
“All right. That’s so. Now you had better run home, and be careful
not to say anything about what you’ve just seen. For I tell you, little
girl, if you do anything to interfere with me and my actions just now,
it’ll be the worst day’s work for your little parson up yonder that ever
was done. So now you know.”
Olivia shivered, but she did not answer or contradict him. She only
said, in a subdued and tremulous voice, “Good-evening, Mr.
Mitchell,” and walked away towards the gate, stumbling over the
chips of stone that lay hidden in the grass, which had been allowed
to remain long and rank in this the south side of the graveyard. She
unlocked the gate, passed out, and was relocking it when she heard
rapid footsteps behind her.
“Give me that key!” said Mrs. Brander’s voice, so hoarse, so agitated
that Olivia looked round before she could be sure that it was really
the vicar’s calm, cold wife.
Her large eyes had deep black semicircles under them; her usually
firm lips were trembling; her whole appearance showed a disorder, a
lack of that dainty preciseness in little things which was so strongly
characteristic of her.
“This key!” said Olivia, doubtfully. “Do you know who is in there?”
Mrs. Brander examined the girl from head to foot with passionate
mistrust, while at the same time she struggled to regain a calmer
manner.
“Who is it?” she asked, with an attempt at an indifferent tone.
“Mr. Mitchell.”
The vicar’s wife drew back from the gate.
“You mean this? You are not playing me a trick?”
“A trick? No. Why should I?”
There was a pause, during which Mrs. Brander stood looking at her
fixedly. As she did not speak, Olivia presently asked—
“Do you still wish to go in?”
Mrs. Brander hesitated, and then drew back with a shudder.
“No,” she murmured, scarcely above her breath, “I—I won’t go in.”
As, however, she did not attempt to go away, Olivia bade her “good-
night,” without getting any answer, and went up the lane towards the
house. She did not wish to call at the Vicarage now; she wanted first
to have time to think over what she had seen and heard in the
churchyard, as well as her interview with Mrs. Brander. A new idea,
which promised to throw light on the whole mystery, had come into
her mind. But there was the key to be returned to Mrs. Warmington.
After a moment’s thought, she decided that she would leave it at the
back door, and thus escape the risk of a meeting with Vernon.
But when she had reached the gate of the yard behind the house,
she heard Vernon’s voice calling her.
“Miss Denison, Miss Denison, wait one moment!”
He had caught sight of her from a side window, and in another
minute he had come down to her.
“Why did you come round this way?” he asked, taking her hand in
one of his, which was hot, and dry, and feverish.
“I—I have the key of the churchyard to return to Mrs. Warmington.”
“And you wanted to escape the chance of seeing me. But I was
watching for you, you know,” said he, looking at her tenderly. Then
he suddenly changed his manner. “I thought you would come and
see me to-day,” he said. “It would be like your usual kindness when
any one is ill.”
“I did call and inquire,” said Olivia, demurely. “But Mrs. Brander was
with you.”
Vernon looked at her earnestly.
“Ah!” he exclaimed; “then I know when you came. I heard your
footsteps.” Then he looked at her curiously, and asked, “Didn’t you
hear voices? Didn’t you hear us talking?”
“Yes,” answered Olivia, simply. “And I heard something of what you
were saying.”
“You will tell me what you heard?”
Olivia answered, looking down—
“I heard her remind you to keep an oath that you had made to her,
and I heard her mention—me!”
“And didn’t you want to know what she meant?”
“I suppose I did.”
“And will you be content not to know?”
“Perhaps I shall. For I think I have guessed something of the truth
already.”
Vernon’s eyes glowed with passionate yearning as they met hers.
“Impossible!” said he, below his breath. “And yet—you women have
such quick perception. If it is true that you know,” he went on, in a
firmer and sterner voice, “I shall never dare to speak to you again.”
Olivia was trembling with excitement. It was not true that she was
mistress of the secret, but there a dim intuition in her mind which
bewildered, sometimes almost maddened, her. She did not attempt
to answer Vernon Brander; but drawing sharply away from him the
hand he still held, she abruptly wished him “good-night,” and putting
the church keys on the wall beside him, ran away up the lane as fast
as her active feet could carry her.
When Olivia reached home she was greeted by severe silence on
the part of her step-mother; while her father, who was usually so
careful to try to make amends for any unkindness of his wife’s by
little unobtrusive attentions, carefully avoided her. The girl learned
the reason of this treatment by remarks which Mrs. Denison,
apropos of nothing, addressed from time to time to the children,
warning them not to spoil their clothes, as they were the last they
would have; telling them not to disturb their father, as he was writing
to a gentleman to whom he owed money, asking for time in which to
repay it; and finally admonishing them to be courteous to Olivia, as
she could have the place sold up in a moment by insulting her
father’s creditors; from which Olivia gathered that Fred Williams had
already vented his spite on her father, and thereby prepared a most
uncomfortable domestic life for her for some time to come.
She affected to take no notice of this treatment however, and did not
even go in search of her father, thinking it would be better to let the
first effects both of Fred’s and of his wife’s ill temper pass off before
she spoke to him on the subject of the former’s addresses.
Telling Lucy to bring her supper up to her rooms, Olivia left the
inharmonious family circle without bidding good-night to any one,
and shut herself up in the east wing, where she could always draw
the bolt of the outer door and be free from molestation. This she did,
and being in a restless and excited state of mind, passed the next
two hours in wandering from one room to the other, considering the
mystery of Nellie Mitchell’s disappearance by the light of all the facts
which, one by one, had come to her knowledge. She had become so
accustomed to these rooms that it was only now and then that she
remembered their connection with the murdered girl. To-night,
however, the recollection startled her at every turn she took in her
walks up and down. She seemed again to see the bedroom as it had
looked on her first entrance, nearly six months ago, the rat scurrying
down the curtains, the carpet lying in damp strings upon the floor, the
mouldy books, and the dust lying thickly on chairs and mantelpiece.
Everything had been changed since then; fresh hangings put to the
bed; bright cretonne coverings to the old furniture; a new carpet, soft
and warm, had replaced the damp rags. But on this particular
evening her imagination seemed stronger than reality; as she walked
from the one room to the other, she pictured to herself always that
the chamber she was not in at the moment was in the state in which
she had first seen it. These fancies grew so strong that they drove
more serious thoughts out of her head; just when she wanted to be
able to analyze the ideas which the day’s occurrences had
suggested, she had lost all power of thinking connectedly; nothing
but bewildering recollections of the words she had heard and the
scenes she had witnessed could be got to occupy her excited mind.
She ran at last to one of her bedroom windows, threw it open, and
looked out. It was dark now, for it was past nine o’clock, and the
evening had turned wet. A light, drizzling summer rain was falling,
and the sky was heavy with clouds. The outlook was so dreary that
after a few minutes she shut the window, shivering, lit the candles,
and tried to read. But she was in such a nervous state that she
uttered a little scream when Lucy, bringing her supper, knocked at
the outer door. Very much disgusted with herself for this display of
feminine weakness, she would not even allow Lucy, who loved to
linger about when she had any little service to perform for “Miss
Olivia,” to stay for a few minutes’ chat. When the supper had been
laid on the table in the outer room, and the bright little maid had run
down stairs, Olivia did not, as usual, lock the outer door after her.
She felt so unaccountably lonely and restless that she went into the
little passage outside her two rooms, and set the outer door open, so
as to feel that her connection with the rest of the human life in the
house was not altogether severed. She even walked to the end of
the corridor and glanced out through the large square window at the
end, listening all the while for some sounds of household life
downstairs. But in this east wing very little could be heard, and this
evening everything seemed to Olivia to be unusually quiet.
The corridor window looked out over fields, showing the farm
garden, with its fruit trees and vegetable beds on the right, and barns
and various other outbuildings on the left. Right underneath was a
neglected patch of land—a corner of the garden not considered
worth cultivation. Lying among the rank grass were an old ladder and
a pile of boards, which had been there when the Denisons took the
farm, and had remained undisturbed ever since. It suddenly occurred
to Olivia, for the first time, how alarmingly easy it would be for an
evilly disposed person to place the ladder against the wall, and to
effect an entrance through the window, the fastening of which she
noticed was broken, and had evidently been so a long time. Not that
such a thing was likely to happen, burglaries being unheard-of things
in this neighborhood. Still, the idea got such firm hold of her excited
fancy that, two hours later, when all the household had retired to
rest, she came out of her apartments in her dressing-gown, to give a
final glance outside, and to make sure that her absurd fears were as
groundless as she told herself they were.
Opening the window and putting her head out into the drizzling rain,
Olivia saw, in the gloom of the misty night, a dark object creeping
stealthily along outside the garden wall. Just as it reached that part
of the wall which was immediately opposite the window, a watery
gleam of moonlight showed through the clouds, and enabled her to
see that the object was a man. The next moment she saw him climb
over into the garden beneath. Still keeping close to the wall, he crept
rapidly along until he was close under the window. Holding her
breath, Olivia watched him as he stooped and lifted the ladder from
the ground. Her blood suddenly seemed to rush to her brain, and
then to trickle slowly back through her veins as cold as ice.
For she recognized him.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Like all persons of strong nature, Olivia Denison grew bolder as
danger came nearer. When she recognized the man in the garden,
underneath the corridor window, it did not occur to her to call for
help; but all her energies were instantly concentrated on learning the
meaning of this intrusion. She was sure that she had not been seen.
As noiselessly as she could she shut the window, and retreated into
the private passage which led to her own apartments. There she
waited, peeping cautiously out under cover of the black shadows of
the corridor, into which the faint moonlight could not penetrate.
She heard the grinding sound made by the ladder as it was set
against the wall, and presently she saw a man’s head appear just
above the ledge outside. He raised his hand, gave three taps on the
glass, and disappeared. A minute later he mounted a step higher
than before, and tapped again. Then, with scarcely an instant’s more
delay, he pushed up the window slowly and noiselessly, and, as
soon as it was wide enough, put one leg over the sill and stood in the
corridor.
Olivia, brave as she was by nature, was transfixed with alarm. What
did he want with her? What shocking confession, what horrible
entreaties, had he come to make to her like this, in the middle of the
night? If she could have shrieked aloud, if she could have run out
and alarmed the household, she would have done so now. But horror
had paralyzed her. The voice she tried to use gave only a hoarse,
almost inaudible rattle. Her limbs were rigid; her breath came and
went in gasps, like that of a person dying of asthma. She could only
stand and stare at the advancing figure, hoping desperately that the
first words he uttered would break this spell, and restore her to
herself. Why did he choose the night time to come and make her the
victim of his guilty confidences? Were they too ghastly to make by
day? That this man was the murderer of Nellie Mitchell she could not
now doubt; the demeanor of his every-day life was utterly changed;
there was guilt expressed in every furtive movement. All her respect
and liking were transformed into loathing and fear; she almost
crouched against the wall as he approached.
He reached the entrance to the corridor, and paused. If she could
only keep still enough for him to pass her! Then she could escape
into the main building of the house, and have time to think what she
should do. But he stopped short, and stretched out his hand to knock
at the door. In the darkness he could not see that it was open. But
how, Olivia suddenly asked herself, did he know there was a door
there at all? Although he moved slowly, too, it was with the manner
of a man who knew his way about the place. Part of the truth flashed
suddenly into her mind: he had been there before. By this time he
had discovered that the door was open. Passing into the corridor, he
shut the door, turned the key, and put it in his pocket. As he did so he
touched Olivia, but did not appear to know it. Now thoroughly
alarmed, she flew along the passage into her bedroom, and was in
time to lock the door before she heard his footsteps in the outer
apartment. There was no lock to the door between the two rooms.
No one was likely to hear her if she shrieked at one of the windows.
Before many minutes were over she felt that she should have to face
him.
She flew across the bedroom floor to blow out the candle, thinking
that in the darkness she would have a better chance of escape. As
she did so she stumbled against a chair, which fell down with a loud
noise. A moment later there was a knock at the inner door. The girl’s
heart stood still. She remained motionless, and gave no answer. The
knock was repeated. Still she was silent. A third time came the
knock, and then a low, hoarse whisper, of one word only, startled her,
and came as a revelation—
“Nellie!”
This was the manner in which, years ago, he had visited the girl
whose love had ended by wearying him so fatally. By what means he
had forgotten the intervening years she did not know, but Olivia
recognized at once that it was not she of whom he was in search.
The knowledge restored in a moment all her courage. If, as she
supposed, fear of discovery had turned his brain, his was a madness
with which she felt she could cope. After only one moment’s
hesitation, she snatched up one of the candles, and unlocking the
door she had secured, passed through the passage into the
adjoining room.
“Mr. Brander!” said she, in a voice which scarcely trembled.
She had to repeat her words three or four times before he moved
from the other door. At last he turned very slowly, and Olivia, raising
the candle high, looked curiously, and not wholly without fear, into his
face.
His eyes were closed; his breathing was heavy. He was asleep!
There flashed through her mind the remembrance of what the Vicar
of Rishton had said about somnambulism, and the strange instances
of it which had occurred in his family. It was clear to her that the
excitement occasioned by Ned Mitchell’s obstinate determination
had preyed upon the mind of the murderer, and led him at last to
perform in sleep an action which had been an habitual one with him
eleven years before.
In spite of the horror of this weird discovery, Olivia’s fears
disappeared at once. She thought she might, without waking him,
persuade him to go back as he had come. If he did wake, she knew
he would not hurt her. She began in a low, intentionally monotonous
voice.
“I think you had better go back to-night. It is getting very late; it is
almost daylight.”
As before, she had to repeat her words before he grasped the sense
of them.
Then he repeated in a whisper, and as if there were something
soothing in the sound of her voice—
“Go back. Yes, go back.”
“I’ll give you a light. Come along,” she went on, coaxingly.
And without a moment’s delay she led the way out into the passage.
Much to her relief, he followed, at the same slow, heavy pace.
“Now,” she said, when they had reached the outer door, “give me the
key, please.”
He felt in his pocket obediently, and produced the key, which she,
overjoyed, almost snatched from his hand. The noise she made in
her excitement, as she opened the door, seemed to disturb him, for
he began to move restlessly, like a person on the point of waking.
Once in the corridor, however, Olivia was bold; she passed her
hands several times slowly down his arms, murmuring in a low,
soothing tone, injunctions to him to get home quickly. This treatment
succeeded perfectly. His manner lost its momentary restlessness,
and it was in the same stolid way as he came that he got out on the
ladder, descended, replaced the ladder in the long grass, and
climbed over the wall.
Olivia watched his retreating figure as long as it was in sight, and
then, feeling sick and cold slunk back into her rooms, not forgetting
to lock the outer door of the passage safely behind her. Like most
women, however brave, when they have been through an exciting
crisis, she felt exhausted, limp, almost hysterical. She staggered as
she entered the bedroom, and it was with a reeling brain that she
walked up and down, up and down, unable to sleep, unable even to
rest. She knew the mystery now, and she felt that the knowledge
was almost more than she could bear.
Next morning her appearance, when she came down late to
breakfast, was so much affected by the awful night she had passed
that even the children wondered what was the matter with her. Mr.
Denison, believing it to be the result of his avoidance of her the
evening before, was cut to the heart with remorse, while his wife,
alarmed at the change in the girl, altered her tone, and did her best
to be kind to her. Olivia could not eat. Her cheeks were almost livid;
her great eyes seemed to fill her face; the hand she held out to be
shaken was cold, clammy, and trembling. Her amiable little half
sister, Beatrix, saw an opening for a disagreeable remark, and made
use of it.
“Mr. Williams wouldn’t say you were pretty if he could see you now,”
said she. “Would he, mamma?”
Like most children, she was quick enough to detect how
inharmonious were the relations between her mother and her step-
sister. She was surprised to find, however, that for once she received
no sympathy from the quarter whence she expected it.
“Be quiet, Beatrix, and don’t be rude,” said Mrs. Denison, sharply,
with a glance at Olivia, on whom she thought that the reference to
the supposed cause of her distress would have some sudden and
violent effect.
“Can’t you keep those children in better order, Susan?” asked Mr.
Denison, peevishly. “Their rudeness is getting quite intolerable.”
However, Olivia scarcely heard this little discussion, and was in no
way moved by it. But when the talk turned to the proposed
restoration of St. Cuthbert’s and from that to the persons interested
in it, she grew suddenly very still, and sat looking down at her plate,
listening to each word with fear of what the next would be.
“I wonder how the vicar likes to see his wife about so constantly with
another man, if it is his own brother,” said Mrs. Denison, who, in spite
of her experience as a governess, was one of those people who
think it doesn’t matter what subjects you discuss before children,
because “they don’t understand.” “I’m sure the last week or so I’ve
scarcely seen one without the other.”
“Well, now, do you know, I thought it was awfully good-natured of
her. You know the stories that have been flying about lately. I’m sure
I don’t pretend to say whether there’s any truth in them or not; still
they have been flying about.”
“And not without some ground, you may depend,” said Mrs. Denison,
tartly.
While avoiding the subject which she supposed to be the cause of
Olivia’s present distress, her step-mother could not resist the
opportunity of giving that headstrong young lady a few gentle thrusts
on the subject of her “fancy for murderers.” Mr. Denison glanced

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Advances in Corpus Applications in

Literary and Translation Studies

German Philosophy in English Translation Postwar

New Perspectives on Corpus Translation Studies (New

The Routledge Handbook of Korean Interpreting 1st

Diverse Voices in Translation Studies in East Asia New

Reframing Realities through Translation New Trends in

Classical Hollywood Film Cycles Routledge Advances in

Translation and Popular Music Transcultural Intimacy in

Translation Globalization and Younger Audiences The

Professor Riccardo Moratto and Professor Defeng Li present contributions focus-

Riccardo Moratto (PhD, FCIL) is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Stud-

Defeng Li, Professor of Translation Studies, is Associate Dean of Faculty of Arts

Translating Controversial Texts in East Asian Contexts

Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation

Relevance Theory in Translation and Interpreting

Towards a Feminist Translator Studies

The Behavioral Economics of Translation

Online Collaborative Translation in China and Beyond

Advances in Corpus Applications in Literary and Translation Studies

Institutional Translator Training

For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/

Edited by Riccardo Moratto and

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa

List of Tables viii

1 Diachronic Trends in Fiction Authors’ Conceptualizations of

2 Within-Author Style Variation in Literary Nonfiction:

3 Charles Dickens’s Influence on Benito Pérez Galdós

4 A Corpus-Stylistic Approach to the Literary Representation

5 Analyzing Who, What, and Where in a Mediæval

7 Orality in Translated and Non-Translated Fictional

8 The Avoidance of Repetition in Translation: A Multifactorial

9 Feminist Translation of Sexual Content: A Quantitative

10 Benefits of a Corpus-based Approach to Translations: The

11 Are Translated Chinese Wuxia Fiction and Western Heroic

12 Translating Personal Reference: A Corpus-Based

13 Lexical Bundles in the Fictional Dialogues of Two

14 Mapping Culture-Specific and Creative Metaphors

1.1 Word Composition of the FAC 13

2.1 Phillip Lopate’s essays: spread of scores on “interactive vs.

Riccardo Moratto (PhD, FCIL) is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Stud-

Defeng Li, Professor of Translation Studies, is Associate Dean of Faculty of Arts

CHEUNG, Joyce Oiwun, is a PhD student at the Department of Chinese and

DIMITROULIA, Titika, is Professor of Translation Studies at Aristotle Univer-

EGBERT, Jesse A., is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern

FANG, Jing, is a lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program at Mac-

FRAISSE, Amel, is Associate Professor at Université de Lille, working on

FU, Shiwei, is PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie

GRACHEVA, Marianna, is PhD Candidate in Applied Linguistics at North-

HOCKING, Darryl, is Senior Lecturer at Auckland University of Technology,

HOU, Linping, received his PhD in English Linguistics, specializing in Cogni-

JENN, Ronald, is Professor of Translation Studies at Université de Lille, France.

LEUNG, Wai-Mun, is Associate Professor of Applied Chinese Linguistics at the

LI, Dechao, is Associate Professor of the Department of Chinese and Bilingual

LIU, Kanglong, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilin-

MASTROPIERRO, Lorenzo is Lecturer in English Language and Translation

MORATTO, Riccardo, is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies

MOUNTFORT, Paul, is Associate Professor in Auckland University of Technol-

NIETO CABALLERO, Guadalupe, is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Univer-

RUANO SAN SEGUNDO, Pablo, is Senior Lecturer at the University of Extrem-

SU, Yanfang, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Chinese and

WONG, Tak-Sum (黃得森), 黃得森 is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chi-

WU, Kan, is Lecturer of Translation Studies, School of Foreign Languages,