A Corpus-based Study of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Exploring literary text(s) with corpus-based approaches is becoming popular and enlarging our
understanding of a particular phenomenon in a text. This study aims to encourage novice
researchers to utilize corpus-based approaches while conducting research in the domain of
literature. The present study applies a corpus-driven approach to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, to see how well this new method works with literary texts. It has been
found that the corpus-driven approach can provide quite a few results that are useful in supporting
and refining literary scholars’ intuitive observations on the author’s works. The significance of the
title and concordance hits and concordance plot of the words portrait, artist, and young man in the
title are observed. The imperative sentences used are explored throughout the novel. Out of all
linguistic features, thirty most used words were collected, which belonged to different parts of
speech and their frequency were noted. The analyst’s knowledge and understanding of the text(s)
under study are crucial in interpreting and evaluating those results because the corpus-driven
approach to literary texts relies heavily on quantitative data. The study affirms that the text can be
well interpreted and explained by using AntConc software.