The corpus of this project Processing “Long Eighteenth Century” Novels for Contextual Comparisons contains 100 works selected were published between 1860 and 1820. Since the data is focused on British literature, all male and female authors are either from Great Britain or Ireland. The selected novels are available in .txt format for reading and further analysis extracted from different sources.
Literary comparisons: Social dynamics and the eighteenth-century British novel
The British novel was an important factor in the public negotiation of cultural change during the eighteenth century. In particular, explicit and implicit literary comparisons between characters on the levels of both content and narrative form played an important role by evoking, commenting on, and evaluating contemporary social practices of comparing. Thus, the novel did not merely document social change, but creatively explored aspects and criteria of comparing within British society – an exploration that fed back into social discourse. The project is investigating this intersection of literary and social practices of comparing against the backdrop of historical processes of modernisation in the 18th century.