Complex network analysis of language networks in novels of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Abstract

Literary style is one of the characteristic of writer which is definitely a recognizable but elusive phenomenon. There have been a lot of researches to analyze the literary style by computational and statistical ways in linguistics. However, those existing methods didn`t consider the relationship among the words. Human languages have shown the complex network features which represented by small-world network and scale-free network. In this paper, we present a new method for analyzing literary style which involves correlation among the words by using complex network analysis. We analyze the literary styles of the three writers: Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and Scott Fitzgerald whom are in same period and used same languages. We suggest that the rare words, which used relatively less frequently, make the network properties of three authors’ network distinguishable. In addition, diversity of links was the most important difference of three authors’network.