Collocating places and words in 19th century London : a geocritical approach -

Abstract

This thesis investigates the representation of space in Victorian London in a corpus of thirty novels. The methodology behind this study is that of geocriticism, a multifocal and geocentered approach coined by Betrand Westphal that attempts to capture space in it heterogeneity rather than approaching it as a stable, inert category. This is done with TopoText, a tool created at the American University of Beirut in the Spring 2013-14 semester that automatically extracts place names from texts and creates word clouds and interactive digital maps of all the places mentioned in the novel. This thesis aims to empirically demonstrate the presence of topics in literature that reflect certain historical and social occurrences of the time, as revealed through different historical narratives, and engages with both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The study also demonstrates how digital tools help test the representation of certain long-standing conceptions in literature, such as East and West London. The digital maps allow visualizing the spatial imagination of the author and tracking spatial clustering over time.