The Tragedy of Strong Ties: Social Networks in "Middlemarch"

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

SPEAKER: Tara Menon, Harvard University

Tara K. Menon will be presenting from her book-in-progress Spoken Words: Direct Speech in Nineteenth-Century British Novels (under contract with Princeton University Press) which combines computational tools with close literary analysis to study direct speech in a wide range of novels published between 1789 and 1901. In this talk, she will present data about speech and character in a selection of canonical nineteenth-century novels and then focus on what we can learn by looking at conversational networks, particularly in Middlemarch.