The amount of literary material available on-line keeps growing rapidly. Not only are there machine-readable texts in libraries, collections and e-book stores, but there is also more and more “live” literature – e-zines, blogs, self-published e-books and so on. There is a need for tools to help users navigate, visualize and appreciate high volume of available literature.

Literary texts are quite different from technical and formal documents, which have been the focus of NLP research thus far. Most forms of statistical language processing rely on lexical information in one way or another. In literature, the primary mode is narrative rather than exposition. Stories may be cognitively easier to read than certain expository genres, such as scientific documents, but it is a challenging form of discourse for NLP tools and methods. For instance, literary prose lacks overt lexical clues and structural markers typically leveraged in the processing of more structured genres. Also, even conventional literary texts exhibit far less unity of time, space and topic than most formal discourse. Learning to handle these challenges in literary data may help move past heavy reliance on surface clues in general.

Literature also differs from other genres because of the needs of its typical audience. For instance, reading, searching or browsing literature online is a different task than searching for the latest news on a particular topic. Search criteria would be rather abstract: not a keyword, but a literary style, similarity to another work, point of view and so on. When looking for a summary or a digest, a reader may prefer to know or visualize a text's broad characteristics than facts which summarize the plot.

We invite papers that touch upon these areas, but also welcome other ideas which promote the processing of literary narrative or related forms of discourse.

A topic like this one is hard to interpret. But for a literary scholar, that’s a plus. I want this technique to point me toward something I don’t yet understand, and I almost never find that the results are too ambiguous to be useful. The problematic topics are the intuitive ones — the ones that are clearly about war, or seafaring, or trade. I can’t do much with those.

An article on Raymond Roussel appeared on page 62 of the 18 December 1910 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, entitled “Yes He Really Likes to Work”:

Founded under the editorship of the antiquary W J Thoms, the primary intention of Notes and Queries was, and still remains, the asking and answering of readers' questions. It is devoted principally to English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism.

Notes and Queries (originally subtitled "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc") is a London-based, quarterly publication, part academic journal, part correspondence magazine, in which scholars and interested amateurs can exchange knowledge on literature and history.

Metaphor is a poetically or rhetorically ambitious use of words, a figurative as opposed to literal use. It has attracted more philosophical interest and provoked more philosophical controversy than any of the other traditionally recognized figures of speech.

This book features a collection of essays by Donald Davidson that explore the relations between language and the world, speaker intention and linguistic meaning, language and mind, mind and body, mind and world, and mind and other minds. Davidson’s underlying thesis is that we are acquainted directly with the world, that thought emerges through interpersonal communication in a shared material world, and that language depends on communication. He also finds interconnections between his views and those of major philosophers of the past.

In his introduction to The Overton Window, Glenn Beck insists that he is writing "faction", that is to say, factual fiction, and you'd be pardoned for giggling at the evidently unintentional and apparently unnoticed neological homophone that's produced in the contraction. Among the Window's many faults--plot points telegraphed so far in advance as to suggest that a time machine is at work; dialogue that makes the Saturday cartoons of my youth sound like Shakespeare--its persistent infelicity is the most vexing. Proper nouns are capitalized and the punctuation, although idiosyncratic, is mostly correct, so I've got to believe that there was an editor. Maybe a few. And yet:The moon was bright and his eyes were well adjusted to the darkness.(Well, maybe I'm giving the punctuation too much credit. That compound sentence desperately wants a comma.) No description escapes its own undermining. The sentence I diagrammed last week works just as hard against itself. After a jumble of images notable mostly for their increasing specificity, the conscious source of the sensation says that he's not sure he heard anything at all. It's one thing to say, "I thought I saw a car pull away, but I couldn't be sure." It's quite another to say, "I thought I saw a car pull away, definitely a late-model BMW, looked like it had a sport package with low-profile tires, and it was red, with PA license plate ABC-1234, and there was a black man approximately 6'3" driving and a white man who weighed about 155 lbs and had a scar over his eye in the passenger seat, but I couldn't be sure." In real life, of course, eyewitnesses tend to confabulate, to add details that they never saw, but as a descriptive device in a story, especially a "thriller," it's a fat fucking dud, draining momentum and urgency, fading into soft focus and filling everything with haze.Anyway, I come not to bury Beck, but to praise him! Sort of. The Overton Window, for all its manifold failures as a book, for all its infelicities and inconsistencies, for its schizoid sensibilities, actually--I swear to the baby Jesus--makes a simplistic but acceptable Marxist critique of the American state. I am not kidding. You have to look beyond the superficial stage dressings of American nationalism and generic anti-tax activism. In fact, the book convincingly identifies the political establishment as a subsidiary set of a more diverse ownership class who, through manipulation of public sentiment and political processes, have created a system of wealth expropriation for their own benefit. Haha, they're capitalists! It is a sign of the success of their real-life counterparts that Beck sings the praises of capitalism and calls them elites. But seriously, change the terminology and keep the lousy writing: this coulda been a freshman paper at Oberlin.

This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. We dip into the cauldron of story, whistle up a hearty spoonful and splosh it in front of you to devour to your heart's content.

Catalogue of medieval Irish narratives & literary enumerations.

Joyce in 1907 spelled out a lot of his theory of Ireland's early history in his Italian lecture "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages."

CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts, brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of 935 contemporary and historical documents from many areas, including literature and the oth

Documents of Ireland is an online database of text, images, maps, sounds and video.

Googlebombing as literature/art: Kenji Siratori is "a Japanese cyberpunk writer who is currently bombarding the internet with wave upon wave of highly experimental, uncompromising, progressive, intense prose."

EarthCore picked up 10,000 listeners as the world's first podcast-only novel, keeping the thousands of fans on the edge of their seat with twenty weekly audiobook installments.

Social theory for fans of popular culture. Popular culture for fans of social theory.

This document defines a set of metadata elements for describing Interactive Fiction games.

Devastating satire of how human societies exploit and assimilate new technologies--in this case, a race of intelligent salamanders. Highly recommended.

An emerging exploration of new applications of markup and computational linguistic technology to the study of Scripture, with an emphasis on practical tools that encourage understanding and personal transformation.

It contains books illustrating examples of collaboration (e.g., biographies of Wordsworth and Pound) with sources on collaborative learning, software engineering, social psychology, and law.

This project seeks to leverage an analysis of collaborative literary creation from historical, technological, and legal philosophical perspectives toward a critique of individualized literary control.

Not just for musicians, but for anybody who is interested in music or philosophy...

The way words are used in this book is akin to the brush strokes of Monet...

Almost like a bad habit, I keep returning to David Foster Wallace's works, searching for anything new he has written...

A note: these essays were not only translated, but also selected by Heath...

Reading Serrres before this book was something of an adventure...

... what else is necessary to say...

This book came highly recommended to me...

From MY COUNTRY RIGHT OR LEFT by George Orwell: "Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly, if only we can keep Hitler out...

Translators of Gogol are often said to do more harm than justice to his works - Russia's greatest humorist often end up more pompous than funny, and despite the many number of translations of his masterpiece Dead Souls, very few non-native readers can...

I used to own this book...

This is simply the best analysis of the "Carnivalesque" and is a valuable preface to Rabelais' novel itself...

Having been bogged down with other Lit Theory books (which range from 20 - 80 dollars) I found this book for under 10 and have used it since day one in understanding the different practices of lit theory and applying those practices works of literature...

As a literature professor, I have a professional responsibility to know about literary theory...

Just over ten years ago, I was holed up in the University of Colorado at Boulder's Norlin library, researching interactive fiction...

I thought that many of Barthes's themes resound astonishingly well even today...

harlequin! poseidon! here is a work that not only achieved more leaps in linguistic innovation at its time but also, the sun beaming in profuse shower, a wild reinvention of plot and a rugged onslaught against tradition...

I have to answer "a reader" from Los Angeles who wrote of the book's (in)completeness...

"A Rhetoric of Motives" was published in 1950, five years after "A Grammar of Motives," the first volume of a planned trilogy "On Human Relations" that was never officially completed...

If I were to recommend any of the stories from this book, it would be the first one, "The Pederson Kid...

My appraisal of this novel coincides with those of A...

I bought this book because several of my friends recommended Raymond Carver in general...

I have to give this book five stars, because it is such an awesome work, and not just in the teenage sense in which everything is awesome...

"The Cannibal" is an engaging, flowing novel that is also completely flat (in character and description) and jumpy, with no emotional involvement and even less dialogue (if that's a gesture of defiance toward literary convention, it certainly doesn't...

The book is highly literate in an abstract way; Bellow makes some fragmented, interesting--if dated and vaguely, naively ethnocentric--observations about some aspects of the world...

I studied on my own for the LSAT and GMAT with very little success...

In the early 1920s, Theodore Gumbril Jr, disenchanted with his teaching job in a boys' school, leaves for London determined to pursue his idea for "pneumatic trousers"...

Is it just me or does Don Quixote set up his peerless Dulcinea of El Toboso to be an object of ridicule by making her out to the most beautiful woman he's ever seen? It's clear he's had hallucinations before...

Guides to "Finnegans Wake" seem to be a dime a dozen now a days, but rarely are they so insightfull and easy to use...

In nine short words: This is the worst book I have ever read...

There was a movie that came out in the nineties, whose title eludes me, in which a businessman's airhead wife is taught the art of intelligent discourse by having her read, however reluctantly at first, Democracy in America...

Go Down Moses was my latest stab at Faulkner...

After reading 'The Corrections' I was expecting to be enlightened by 'How to be alone'...

I recently read this book again this time in English...

Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece is not about abstract art! It is about the destructive power of obsession for perfection...

JR is one of the funniest novels I've read...

If Infinite Jest has become the Ulysses of the late twentieth century, then this excellent guide is the equivalent of Stuart Gilbert's companion to Joyce's masterpiece: Burn offers a lucid unravelling of some of the more mysterious aspects of Wallace's...

I s Gore Vidal a great writer? It depends on what he is writing...

As dense as it is deep, Bukatman's work is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in science fiction, postmodern theory, or the relationship between technology and human culture...

First of all if you are determined to purchase a copy of "A Handful of Dust," click thee away from this page and hie thee to the page for the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics version, which is far superior...

I picked up this book based on the recommendation from British pop icon, Morrissey...

As the author of the world's longest palindrome and other literary feats, Perec's phenomenal linguistic skills and imagination remain incomparable...

I picked up this book primarily for the purpose of reading Benjamin's critically acclaimed essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", as well as for his darkly poetic - and even apocalyptic - "Theses on the Philosophy of History"...

It's tempting to put quotes around the word "stories" when talking about John Berger's stories in Photocopies since they aren't really stories at all: they're sketches, quick studies, notes for stories, tributes, obituaries, or fey bulletins from a...

I haven't read the Mann book - but what I got out of White's Magic Mountain was pure, unapologetic pain...