Detecting the Style and Genre of Brian Jacques’ Writing: A Computational Approach

Abstract

Stylistic analysis in a literary research assists readers understand and appreciate the meaning of a text by inspecting language patterns and the interconnectedness between linguistics and literary interpretation. The selected poem from the children’s novel, Mariel of Redwall is widely known for its author’s intellectual fantasy composition. Despite this fact, the style and the pedagogical evidence of the text remains unexplored and therefore this study attempts to address this by intensive stylistic analysis through computational method and explores how these features can be utilized in a pedagogical context. This research employs a mixed method, where qualitative method to discover the stylistic elements at various levels and quantitative methods such as John Ure’s lexical density and a computational linguistic tool, MAT to calculate the richness of language employed and to compute the type of genre and contextual intention of the poem respectively. The study identifies literary essence at graphological, phonological, morphological, and lexical level through stylistics. Using John Ure’s lexical density, an accuracy of 39.8 is calculated to test the lexical competency. Through the application of MAT, the genre, types of narratives, and functions of the text are identified. Through the results from integrating literature and computational tool, this interdisciplinary research is proved to be a recommended effective pedagogical model for children in future. The research anticipates to contribute to the existing body of knowledge in stylistics and potential application of computing pedagogy in the field of literary and language acquisition.