Early twentieth-century British and American romance: a corpus-driven stylistic analysis of the representation of heroines in works by female and male authors

This study compares the writing styles of three male authors (Theodore Dreiser, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence) and three female authors (Edith Wharton, E. M. Hull, and Elinor Glyn) of early twentieth-century English romance fiction. Using a corpus-driven approach, it explores the linguistic patterns that characterize the authors' writing, and examines how their heroines are portrayed. Two gender-specific corpora, the “Male Novels Corpus” and the “Female Novels Corpus”, were compiled. They were analysed with the tools available on the “Sketch Engine” platform, focusing on high-frequency words, n-grams, keywords, and collocates related to the heroines. The analysis revealed that both the male and the female authors frequently employ vocabulary associated with action and movement, and that the most prominent keywords are often character names. The heroines are commonly depicted as passive recipients of actions or experiencers of emotions, frequently surrounded by words carrying negative semantic prosody. However, the male and the female authors differ in their emphasis: the male writers tend to focus more on external settings, while the female writers foreground inner thoughts and emotional states. The male authors associate the heroines with body parts, mental activities, and interpersonal relationships, whereas the female authors primarily link them to body-related vocabulary. Furthermore, the semantic domains connected with the heroines in the “Male Novels Corpus” center on emotional experiences and family relationships, whereas those in the “Female Novels Corpus” are mainly relevant to physical descriptions and reactions, social background and interactions, and emotional experiences.