Sentiment analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction writings
Date
2023-01-05Author
Estado
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersionMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
. 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.
Sentiment analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction writings
Tipo de Actividad
Artículos en revistasISSN
2405-8440Materias/ categorías / ODS
Innovación docente y Analytics (GIIDA)Palabras Clave
Lovecraft, Rueda de las emociones de Plutchik, Análisis literario computacional, Análisis de los sentimientos, cuentos rarosLovecraft, Plutchik's Wheel of emotions, Computational literary analysis, Sentiment analysis, Weird tales