Emotion and Modifier in Henry Rider Haggard’s Novels (2023)

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in employing quantitative methods to analyze literary texts, as they offer unique insights, theories, and interpretations. In light of this, the current study employs quantitative analysis to examine the fiction written by the renowned British adventure novelist, Sir Henry Rider Haggard. Specifically, the study aims to investigate the affective content and prevalence of distinctive linguistic features in six of Haggard’s most distinguished works. We evaluate dominant emotional states at the sentence level as well as investigate the deployment of specific linguistic features such as modifiers and deontic modals, and collocated terms. Through sentence-level emotion analysis the findings reveal a notable prevalence of “joy”-related emotions across the novels. Furthermore, the study observes that intensifiers are employed more commonly than the mitigators as modifiers and the collocated terms of modifiers exhibit high similarity across the novels. By integrating quantitative analyses with qualitative assessments, this study presents a novel perspective on the patterns of emotion and specialized grammatical features in some of Haggard’s most celebrated literary works.

## introduction henry rider haggard was a prominent british novelist and acclaimed adventure fiction writer known for his captivating tales set in exotic locations, particularly africa. he is considered a pioneer in the lost world genre, characterized by thrilling narratives of exploration and discovery in remote and enigmatic places. one of his most famous series of novels features the adventures of allan quatermain, a white hunter. haggard's works are notable for their vivid descriptions of african landscapes, depictions of african culture, and imaginative portrayals of ancient civilizations. in addition to the allan quatermain series, haggard's novels she and its sequel, the return of she, have gained widespread recognition as seminal examples of imperialistic fiction, showcasing a fusion of adventure, romanticism, and supernatural elements. digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field that combines humanities disciplines such as history, literature, and philosophy with computer science and technology to study and create new forms of digital culture @xcite . in recent years, interest in quantitative analysis of digital humanities has been on the rise with the help of accessible tools and methodologies that encompass a range of approaches, including natural language processing (nlp) and text mining, network analysis, data visualization, statistical analysis, and machine learning @xcite . more researchers and professionals in this field are becoming interested in using numerical and statistical methods to study various cultural and humanistic phenomena. researchers have been using nlp and text mining techniques to analyze text depicting literary works, historical documents, or online archives for diverse purposes @xcite @xcite @xcite . in this study, we focus on analyzing the emotional and specific linguistic features of six of henry rider haggard's most celebrated novels, employing a variety of natural language processing (nlp) techniques. in particular, we aim to explore the following research aspects-rq1: how emotional tones are illustrated in henry rider haggard's most popular classics? rq2: whether the usage of two linguist features: modifiers and deontic modals vary across haggard's popular novels? we first analyze the presence of various forms of emotions across the six novels by scrutinizing the distribution of emotions at the sentence level. we find similar patterns of emotions at the sentence level in all six novels, with joy being the most frequently occurring emotion. in addition, we conduct a linguistic analysis to identify the occurrence of specific linguistic phenomena, such as the usage of mitigators, intensifiers, and deontic modals. our results indicate that although the comparative presence of intensifiers and modifiers varies across the novels a bit, in general, the percentages are similar, within the range of 0.2%-0.3% for intensifiers and 0.19%-0.25% for mitigators. overall, our findings indicate substantial degrees of consistency in all the attributes studied across all six novels. ## dataset the six literary works, namely king solomon's mines (ksm), allan quatermain (aq), the holy flower (hf), the ivory child (ic), she (she), and ayesha, the return of she (ars), are obtained from the project gutenberg foot_0 library as utf-8 formatted text files. to ensure only literary content is analyzed, we manually remove the metadata present in the text file of each novel. the nltk tokenizer @xcite is employed to segment the text of each novel into sentences. very short sentences containing fewer than three words are excluded from the analysis. the resulting dataset is summarized in ## emotion analysis emotion analysis in literature is the study of emotions and sentiments expressed in written works, such as novels, poems, and short stories employing computational and linguistic methods. emotion analysis can recognize emotional words and phrases, identify patterns of emotion over time, and categorize emotions into broad categories, such as joy, anger, or sadness. here, we explore the distributions of prevalent emotions at the sentence-level. we utilize the emonet emotion recognition framework @xcite to ascertain the prevailing emotions at the sentence level. the emonet framework can identify eight primary categories of emotions @xcite , namely joy (joy), anticipation (ant), surprise (sur), trust (tru), anger (ang), disgust (dis), fear (fea), and sadness (sad) in text. we compute the relative frequencies of each primary emotion category in each of the novels and report their respective distributions. it should be noted that according to the authors of emonet, each primary emotion category in emonet encompasses three related types (i.e., subcategories) of emotions, as defined by @xcite . for example, joy encompasses the following three types of emotionsecstasy, joy, and serenity. therefore, overall, 24 types of emotions are considered in this study. ## specialized modifiers we analyze the presence of three specific types of linguistic feature, intensifier, mitigator and deontic modal, which can be grouped under a broader category of modifiers. intensifiers and mitigators allow the precise representation of attitudes and opinions by adapting the strength or weakness of the language to correspond to the circumstance. on the other hand, the deontic modal expresses obligations, permissions, or requirements in relation to actions or events. ## results and discussion as ## summary and future work as a preliminary study, here, we scrutinize the emotional and specific linguistic aspects of six celebrated works of henry rider haggard leveraging various nlp techniques. the emotion recognition framework reveals similar patterns of emotions in all six novels, with joy being the most dominant. the linguistic analysis uncovers the frequency and presence of modifiers, intensifiers, and deontic modals and the collocated words and phrases. overall, this research observes uniformity in the examined features across all six novels. the findings of this preliminary study reveal emotional and specific linguistic aspects of some of haggard's most celebrated works. some possible future works will focus on a finegrained analysis of emotion, such as identifying sub-categories of primary emotions and understanding the changes of emotions throughout the story, and finding how it is related to plot twists and other narrative elements. besides, we will encompass an augmented set of linguistic features to conduct a more exhaustive analysis. furthermore, additional novels authored by henry rider haggard from multiple genres will be explored to find the consistency and divergence of linguistic and psychological patterns.