Analyzing Henry Fielding’s The Coffee-House Politician; or the Justice Caught in His Own Trap using Close and Distant Reading
Date
2024-09-17
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0009-0004-3532-8097
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
The Coffee-House Politician; or the Justice Caught in His Own Trap (1730) is a largely disregarded play by Henry Fielding. While Fielding’s other work has undergone extensive critical work, The Coffee-House Politician has been mostly ignored, with fewer than ten articles analyzing this play. The goal of this thesis is to study the elements of textual analysis and to use a methodology based on visualizations and quantitative analysis of text in in addition to a close reading. The text visualization tools created for The Grub Street Project enable such examination of the text. This process included the creation of a digital text using HTML5 in combination with Schema.org tagging to highlight the people, places, events, and creative works included in this play. The tagging generates data for exploring the context, theme, plot, characterization, satire, and other elements through visualizations, such as force-directed and hierarchical-edge-bundling graphs. In addition to the visualizations created from the tagged entities, other visualizations, such as word trees, maps, and word frequency lists, were created. Maps allow the user to interact with zoomable maps of the period, providing context. This thesis uses these visualizations to compare to the written text to confirm the textual elements of this play. The findings of this study show that there are definite advantages to using a combined method of close and text visualizations to complete a textual analysis. The visualizations show often-hidden connections between characters and other entities and provide details that could be missed in a typical close reading of the text.
Description
Keywords
Henry Fielding Newspapers
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
English
Program
English