Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

The Emotion Dynamics of Literary Novels

Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Adam Hammond, Graeme Hirst, Saif M. Mohammad

TL;DR

The findings show that the narration and the dialogue largely express disparate emotions through the course of a novel, and that the commonalities or differences in the emotional arcs of stories are more accurately captured by those associated with individual characters.

Abstract

Stories are rich in the emotions they exhibit in their narratives and evoke in the readers. The emotional journeys of the various characters within a story are central to their appeal. Computational analysis of the emotions of novels, however, has rarely examined the variation in the emotional trajectories of the different characters within them, instead considering the entire novel to represent a single story arc. In this work, we use character dialogue to distinguish between the emotion arcs of the narration and the various characters. We analyze the emotion arcs of the various characters in a dataset of English literary novels using the framework of Utterance Emotion Dynamics. Our findings show that the narration and the dialogue largely express disparate emotions through the course of a novel, and that the commonalities or differences in the emotional arcs of stories are more accurately captured by those associated with individual characters.

The Emotion Dynamics of Literary Novels

TL;DR

The findings show that the narration and the dialogue largely express disparate emotions through the course of a novel, and that the commonalities or differences in the emotional arcs of stories are more accurately captured by those associated with individual characters.

Abstract

Stories are rich in the emotions they exhibit in their narratives and evoke in the readers. The emotional journeys of the various characters within a story are central to their appeal. Computational analysis of the emotions of novels, however, has rarely examined the variation in the emotional trajectories of the different characters within them, instead considering the entire novel to represent a single story arc. In this work, we use character dialogue to distinguish between the emotion arcs of the narration and the various characters. We analyze the emotion arcs of the various characters in a dataset of English literary novels using the framework of Utterance Emotion Dynamics. Our findings show that the narration and the dialogue largely express disparate emotions through the course of a novel, and that the commonalities or differences in the emotional arcs of stories are more accurately captured by those associated with individual characters.
Paper Structure (26 sections, 8 figures, 7 tables)

This paper contains 26 sections, 8 figures, 7 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Related Work
  3. Literary Emotion Dynamics
  4. Aspects of Gender
  5. Research Questions and Experiments
  6. The Emotion Dynamics of Novels (RQ1)
  7. Emotion mean:
  8. Variability:
  9. Peak Distance and Displacement Lengths:
  10. Rise and Recovery Rates:
  11. Emotion Arcs Within a Novel (RQ2)
  12. Q1:
  13. Q2:
  14. Diversity of Character Arcs (RQ3)
  15. Q3:
  16. ...and 11 more sections

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: Boxplots of the distributions of mean and variability for each of the three affective dimensions and all novels in PDNC, when the entire novel and the narration are considered to be uttered by a single meta-speaker, and when each character's utterances are considered individually.
  • Figure 2: Distribution of arc correlations between narration and dialogue (irrespective of character) for all three VAD dimensions.
  • Figure 3: Distribution of valence arc correlations.
  • Figure 4: Emotion arcs of valence for character pairs with the highest and lowest correlation scores.
  • Figure 5: Distribution of the emotion mean for VAD, grouped by speaker (y-axis) and author (box color) gender.
  • ...and 3 more figures