La cifra del moderno. Per una critica computazionale del lungo Settecento

Recent developments in the field of Digital Humanities have offered researchers new methodo- logical perspectives, by combining the methods and statistical tools typical of corpus linguistics with the her- meneutic practice of literary criticism. Despite a large number of works has illustrated the advantages of using computational methods in literary studies, most literary scholars still disregard the epistemological connection that exists between the quantitative and qualitative approaches, thus treating them as mutually exclusive. On this backdrop, this paper aims to show that the two approaches can coexist, by performing an act of “compu- tational criticism” on a corpus of novels and periodical essays representative of the time, and discussing their role in influencing and determining the linguistic-ideological configuration of the long English 18th century. In particular, the paper aims to clarify, by exemplification, how the use of quantitative methods may support researchers in literary and cultural studies in interpreting data.