Graduation Year
Spring 2014
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Department
English
Reader 1
Jacqueline Wernimont
Reader 2
Warren Liu
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2014 Caitlin E. Powell
Abstract
This project examines the corpus of novels that have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and, using the prize as a creator of a contemporary literary canon, attempts to develop a model of a contemporary best text. Using the distant reading techniques proposed by digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti to track and graph a variety of formal and structural variables across the corpus of nominees, it becomes apparent that the kind of novel that typically wins the Booker Prize and thus the kind of novel that qualifies as a contemporary best text fits a distinct mold. These novels are solemn, serious texts written by British or Irish men, and the stories they tell concern young British or Irish men struggling, often alone, in pain, and under the threat of impending age, through a brutal, violent, and amoral world.
Recommended Citation
Powell, Caitlin E., "Man Pain in the Man Booker Prize: A Quantitative Approach to Contemporary Canon Formation" (2014). Scripps Senior Theses. 425.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/425
