Sentiment analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction writings

Abstract

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This paper, at the intersection of literary studies, computational literary analysis and psychology, analyzes Lovecraft’s literary production throughout his career. Fifty-four writings from the period 1905–1935, which span almost all of his career as a fiction writer, have been studied by applying the computational techniques of sentiment analysis and following a methodology structured in three stages. In the first one, I analyzed each of the writings, in order to identify the relative percentage of emotion-inducing words according to Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. The second phase of this process consisted of hierarchical cluster analysis to identify homogeneous groups of works. Finally, in the third step of the research, I conducted a statistical analysis. The results point to three different conclusions. First, the quantitative analysis confirms that there exists an intimate connection between the emotions of fear and sadness in Lovecraft’s writings, which generates an intense emotion of despair. Second, the vast majority of his works can be grouped into two categories, each with a distinct pattern in terms of emotions. Finally, there seems to be a relationship between the identified categories and the evolution of Lovecraft’s style; that is, there is a temporal evolution toward much darker works, which are dominated by negative emotions.