The Novel in the Spanish Silver Age: A Digital Analysis of Genre Using Machine Learning

Abstract

What distinguishes an adventure novel from a historical novel? Can the same text belong to several genres? More to one than to another? Have some existing genres been overlooked? To answer these and similar questions, the author combines methods from Linguistics (lexicography), Literary Studies (genre theory), and Computer Science (machine learning, natural language processing). Located in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, this study analyzes a newly developed corpus of 358 Spanish novels of the silver age (1880-1939), which includes authors like Baroja, Pardo Bazán, or Valle-Inclán. Calvo Tello's key result is a graph-based model of literary genre that reconciles recent theoretical approaches.