Heinrich von Kleist's prose texts corpus analysis using LancsBox X

This corpus comprises Heinrich von Kleist’s eight Novellen and short stories (written and published between 1807 and 1811), as well as two essays (Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden and Über das Marionettentheater), and a broad selection of his minor narrative texts (political writings, articles, reviews, anecdotes, etc.) collected in Politische Schriften und andere Nachträge zu seinen Werken (edited by Rudolf Köpke, 1862). All texts are written in German and were sourced from Project Gutenberg. In accordance with a criterion of stylistic coherence, Kleist’s dramatic works and verse compositions were deliberately excluded, as was his private correspondence. The software used for this analysis is LancsBox X, developed by Lancaster University as a tool for linguistic corpus analysis. The corpus contains the following data related to Kleist’s prose works (1789–1811): word and cluster frequencies (ranging from one-word to ten-word units with a minimum frequency of two), relative frequencies, Average Reduced Frequency (i.e., frequency minus near repetitions of a given word or cluster), range of occurrence (i.e., whether a word appears in the short stories or in other texts), range percentage, coefficient of variation, Juilland’s D value, and deviation of proportions. The data collected in the corpus have not been altered or interpreted in any way, in order to facilitate their reuse by other researchers. It should be noted that, in several cases, data entries refer to the same cluster with a one-word shift forward or backward. These entries have been retained on the assumption that researchers can easily filter the information according to their needs. Given Kleist’s distinctive writing style and his tendency to employ sentences of extraordinary length, the analysis of these clusters may prove to be a particularly valuable tool for studying his writing process. Moreover, the pioneering character of his narrative prose within the context of German literature, as well as the close relationship between his literary vision and his philosophical and political ideas, constitute further lines of inquiry that may benefit from this corpus. A second document has been added in which all derivatives of the word Recht appearing in the corpus are recorded, along with the number of times these terms occur within any cluster. Interestingly, only 10 of the 65 recorded words appear exclusively in Kleist’s political or journalistic texts, while the remaining 55 also appear (or appear exclusively) in his short stories. A comparison of these two subgroups highlights both the centrality of the concept of justice in Kleist’s work and the breadth of this lexical field across his writings.