Record Detail

When the writers Paul Heyse and Hermann Kurz edited the collection of narrative texts published under the name Novellenschatz (treasure of novellas), in selecting the texts and writing the quite instructive introductions to the texts and the collection they were led by a notion of what a novella is. This essay analyses some aspects of this concept of novella. Starting with the discussion, whether the collection is representative for the German novellas of the 19th Century, three approaches
are presented. First a method is presented which allows to determine models for authors in a collection spanning some time. Applying this method to the Novellenschatz yields the rather surprising result, that the romantic writer Eichendorff is the most influential writer of the corpus. Secondly, a definition of the novellas as having a clear-cut silhouette in comparison to the novel is tested using the character
interactions modeled as a graph as proxy. The result shows that there really is a difference between the genres, at least the novellas in the collection and a collection
of contemporary novels. Thirdly, using PCA on the hundred most frequent words it can be shown that one of the components is clearly different for the text by female authors in the collection, a closer analysis reveals that the texts by female authors have been selected based on the gender of the protagonist, while the selection of texts by male authors wasn’t restricted by gender politics.