Different Loves: A Corpus Stylistics Analysis of Pride and Prejudice and North and South

Abstract

It is difficult to find something that has not been written about Pride and
Prejudice (1813). This novel is the best known work of Jane Austen and one of the most
famous novels in the entire literature history. This, however, makes the novel too
overanalyzed by both critics and scholars. North and South (1855) by Elizabeth Gaskell may
not be so famous, but it shares some key features with the work mentioned earlier. In this
point, a simple narrative analysis would be insufficient, therefore corpus linguistics might
throw some light into the comparison between the two.
As both novels are considered romantic, and they show some similar characteristics, it was
decided to search the term love and it semantic field in both novels. The results were
compared with the plot of the novels itself and also one of the aims was to be able to see the
differences between the author’s narratives.
The following paper does not fill in one category. It was thought as a way to incorporate
linguistics into the analysis of literature.