Abstract:
This paper reports on the teaching of an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar on English linguistics and literature at the University of Augsburg (Germany). The focus of this seminar was 19th century women¿s fiction, with three novels discussed from literary and linguistic perspectives: Jane Austen¿s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley¿s Frankenstein, and Charlotte Brontë¿s Jane Eyre. The paper describes the main corpus stylistic methods that were applied in the analysis of these three novels by the students (inspired by Stubbs¿s 2005 outline of corpus linguistic methodologies in the study of literary texts). It is shown how keyword and collocation analyses (Scott 1999) can provide information on key themes of the novels, the construal of characters and socio-cultural attitudes prevalent in 19th century English society. The seminar is also evaluated in terms of its success, in particular with respect to interdisciplinarity and corpus stylistics.
