What’s in the brain that ink may character …. : A quantitative narrative analysis of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets for use in (Neuro-)cognitive poetics

In this theoretical paper, we would like to pave the ground for future empirical studies in Neurocognitive Poetics by describing relevant properties of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets extracted via Quantitative Narrative Analysis. In the first two parts, we quantify aspects of the sonnets’ cognitive and affective-aesthetic features, as well as indices of their thematic richness, symbolic imagery, and semantic association potential. In the final part, we first demonstrate how the results of these quantitative narrative analyses can be used for generating testable predictions for empirical studies of literature. Second, we feed the quantitative narrative analysis data into a machine learning algorithm which successfully classifies the 154 sonnets into two main categories, i.e. the young man and dark lady poems. This shows how quantitative narrative analysis data can be combined with computational modeling for identifying those of the many quantifiable sonnet features that may play a key role in their reception.