Presentations

A conference paper showing a variety of ways in which sentiment analysis can enrich the study of emotion in late Victorian fiction. The presentation shows the strengths of empirical, quantitative methods for large scale analyses, but concedes that close reading emotion is better served by a mixed approach.

A conference presentation testing the hypothesis that negativity bias has caused late Victorian novels with lower mean emotional valence to have higher cultural longevity. The hypothesis is confirmed, but the effect is weak (R=-0.087, p=0.038).

This paper argues that the inequality of the present day popularity enjoyed by the two novels is the result of small differences of literary quality, which were amplified by the dynamics of the market. The paper investigates both intratextual (e.g. the formal features of the texts, the presence of certain topics of contemporary interest) and extratextual aspects (e.g. the different fortunes of their adaptations in early cinema, the advertising strategies of their publishers) that might have contributed to the divergent cultural longevity of these two novels.

The popularity of late Victorian novels in the present day is characterized by extreme inequality. This paper tests the hypothesis that some novels that were bestsellers upon publication failed to linger in the collective memory of subsequent generations of readers due to “cultural pollutants”, or “transmission blockers” — elements of the text filled with contemporary context that hinder the cultural transmission of the novels across time.

First contact narratives in mid-20th century science fiction were not only commonplace, but displayed certain similarities. I argue that the interplay between Cold War cultural anxieties and certain cognitive biases contributed towards the popularity of a unique variation of the first contact trope.

Films featuring ostracism often display striking similarities, despite the different sociocultural milieu they were released in. In this presentation I offer a biocultural explanation for these similarities—the filmmakers deliberately craft their films so as to pander to both the cultural background and biological imperatives of the audience.