ABSTRACT
This book has argued that repeated patterns in the form of clusters function as textual building blocks for the fictional worlds in Dickens’s novels. The present approach is text-driven. It has shown how computer-assisted methods can be used for the retrieval and analysis of textual patterns. The analysis of the textual patterns is situated in a corpus stylistic research context that aims to combine linguistic and literary concerns (see Chapter 1). Links between the corpus approach and literary criticism are made through the focus on Dickens’s techniques of characterisation that seem to have been particularly successful for the creation of memorable characters (see Chapter 2). Repeated phrases to define and identify characters relate to the linguistic concept of the cluster as a repeatedly occurring sequence of words.
