Forking Paths - (Digital Humanities) by Luca Giovannini (Paperback)

About the Book

How did European drama fragment into national forms? Computational analysis of hundreds of early modern plays reveals new structural patterns.

Book Synopsis

The French théâtre classique, the English Renaissance and Restoration stage, the Spanish comedia nueva: by the late seventeenth century, European drama had crystallised into strikingly different traditions, each one with its own distinctive formal features. But how did this diversity arise? Drawing on a multilingual corpus of early modern plays and employing novel computational methods, Luca Giovannini offers here an empirical reconstruction of the evolution of dramatic literature in Europe between 1561 and 1710. Both a contribution to comparative literary history and a methodological proposal for the computational study of literary form, this book shows how quantitative approaches can help reshape long-standing humanistic debates.

About the Author

Luca Giovannini, born in 1995, works as research coordinator for the Network for Digital Humanities at the University of Potsdam. After studying comparative literature in Turin, Warwick, and Cologne, he got a joint PhD in the same field from the University of Potsdam and the University of Padova. His research mostly deals with the computational investigation of literary and cultural artefacts.