Lucy Hutchinson and the authorship of two seventeenth-century poems: a computational approach

Title: Lucy Hutchinson and the authorship of two seventeenth-century poems: a computational approach
Creator: Burrows, John; Craig, Hugh
Relation: The Seventeenth Century Vol. 16, Issue 2, p. 259-282
Relation: http://journals.mup.man.ac.uk/cgi-bin/MUP?COMval=article&key=SVC/V16I2/160259.xml
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2001
Description: Two poems attributed to Lucy Hutchinson by David Norbrook prove to have strong affinities with the style of her known verse on quantitative measures. A twenty-canto versification of Genesis titled Order and Disorder and a much shorter rejoinder to Waller's 'Panegyrick' of Cromwell were tested, using data from the frequencies of very common words, and with a set of twenty-five poets and a group of other long poems as controls. With or without the selection of Hutchinson 'marker words' the target poems clustered with Hutchinson's other work in a way which leaves little doubt as to their authorship. These results confirm Norbrook's attribution and help establish quite a varied canon for Hutchinson, and one which is of considerable importance in Civil War and Restoration literary history.
Subject: Lucy Hutchinson; computational statistics attribution; literary history; Civil War and Restoration
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/27047
Identifier: uon:1333
Identifier: ISSN:0268-117X
Language: eng
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