earticle

영어

Nowadays, with the development of natural language processing, emotional messages encoded in spoken or written texts can be explored with technology. While digital humanity (DH) is regarded as the crisis of the humanities, it can, on the other hand, empower and enhance humanity studies. Numerous studies about Jane Austen have been conducted, but few of them engage with the sentiments of her novels. To detect the sentimental changes in Austen's novels and relations between the novels and Austen's cultural background, this research combines several open-source tools (R packages) with custom scripts and modifications to produce sentimental trajectories of Austen's early and late novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. The findings of this research are fourfold. Firstly, in both novels, Austen subverts the conventional image of “beautiful heroine” and emphasizes the capabilities of normal girls in solving problems so as to encourage them stand on the center of their own life stage. Secondly, Persuasion, though written when Austen was sick, has a higher sentiment value than Northanger Abbey. Thirdly, in expressing negative emotions in Northanger Abbey, Austen uses “linguistic negations” to satirize the conventional Gothic narratives. Fourthly, the depressed emotions in Persuasion always stimulate introspection of the characters and help them become more mature.