Character Centrality in Present-Day Dutch Literary Fiction

In the critique of literary representation, the depiction of literary characters has been studied from ideological perspectives. Hierarchies can be exposed by determining the centrality of a character relative to other characters. As an addition to such close reading methods, the present paper proposes an approach to character centrality that combines network analysis with narratology. This explorative study is based on a dataset of demographic metadata on 2,137 characters from a corpus of 170 contemporary Dutch novels. We extract social networks of characters from each novel, and rank all cha... Mehr ...