Miles and more: quantifying mobility in the English novel

Abstract

Miles and More - Quantifying Mobility in the English Novel investigates British prose from the 18th and 19th century to analyse the prominence of mobility as a central motif, conceptual metaphor and a structuring device. Methodologically, this book pursues methods derived from the digital humanities and specifically engages with distant reading, quantitative formalism and corpus stylistics. This book uses Jane Austen’s novels as a case study to show how literature can be treated as data and analysed accordingly. Initially, distances, locations, means of transportation and mobility patterns in Austen’s texts are quantified and interpreted in the context of class and gender. A subsequent larger case study compares more than forty 18th and early 19th century British novels using keyword analysis and the corpus analysis tool AntConc. Here, mobility configurations in novels by Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, William Godwin and Fanny Burney are explored, highlighting particularly how these texts negotiate self-determined and involuntary journeys, carriages and the concept of home. Further case studies explore mobility and immobility in Gothic fiction. Lastly, this inquiry investigates temporal-spatial patterns that cross established genre categories and argues that these patterns can be analysed in terms of stability and instability, expansion and constriction. This study demonstrates that prose texts contain a limited set of spatial configurations that describe the mobility of characters and culminates in a suggested typology of mobile novels.