theme-d-Prose 1848-1920

The literary text corpus "theme-d-Prose 1848-1920" is a specialized collection of 1,227 German-language literary prose texts (shortest: 2,048 words; longest: 100,909 words).

It is an extended subcorpus of "d-Prose 1870-1920" (Gius/Guhr/Adelmann 2021), which is the source of 804 of its text files, originally taken from the corpus KOLIMO (Herrmann and Lauer 2017), which in turn is based on the repositories Gutenberg-DE (Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Hille & Partner, and Reuters 2017), Deutsches Textarchiv (Geyken et al. 2011), and TextGrid (TextGrid Repository 2020).

An additional 423 texts were added from Gutenberg-DE (Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Hille & Partner, and Reuters 2017), the Deutsches Textarchiv (Geyken et al. 2011), and the Wikisource Collections (Wikimedia Stiftung 2023).

In terms of social and literary history, the selected publication period (1848-1920) covers a time of many political changes in the German-speaking area with a diverse literary production that can retrospectively be grouped into the following major literary movements and epochs: the end of pre-March and the Biedermeier, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Expressionism. 

In addition to the nationality of the authors and the years of publication, the texts for "theme-d-Prose 1848-1920" were selected primarily on the basis of the 'non-fictional elements', such as geographical, political, or historical entities, present in their fiction, which were found to share a common spatial and temporal setting of their fictional worlds representing the German-speaking area of the 19th and early 20th centuries, making "theme-d-Prose 1848-1920" to be an extended and thematically specialized "d-Prose 1870-1920" subcorpus.

Each text was manually tagged with the markup XML element from the TEI standards (TEI Consortium 2022, Burnard, Schöch, and Odebrecht 2021). In addition to that, the indications of volume (e.g. "Buch 1" or "Band 2") and chapter headings or chapter numbers were manually tagged with markup XML elements for volumes and for chapters.

The text corpus is available as a zipped folder of XML files and has been enriched with metadata in an additional CSV file.

The CSV file contains basic metadata about:

the authors: name, pseudonyms, year of birth and death, gender, nationality, authority file identifier (GND ID, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek 2024)

the corpus texts: title, number of words, date of first publication, genre (as far as this information is directly documented in the consulted repositories, i.e. in the metadata of d-Prose, or Wikipedia and the consulted literary encyclopedias and literary histories, such as Arnold (2020), Killy and Kühlmann (2008), Stein and Stein (2008), or Brenner (2011))

the fiction of the texts: information about the time and place of the fiction, including keywords and quotes taken from the texts

number of texts
sum in words
average
median
standard deviation

1,227
34,534,384
28,145.38
16,971
27,036.46

total number of authors
346
100%

number of female authors
89
25.7%

number of male authors
257
74.3%

number of texts
percentage of the entire corpus

by female authors
315
25.7%

by male authors
912
74.3%

decade
number of texts
number of words

1848-1860
137
2,382,896

1861-1870
135
2,353,938

1871-1880
121
3,584,370

1881-1890
162
4,684,519

1891-1900
256
6,695,539

1901-1910
258
8,488,707

1911-1920
158
6,344,415

Clusters of Subcorpora:

cluster name
subcorpora
number of texts
number of words
shortest text
longest texts

author gender

female authors

male authors

316

912

9,938,452

24,595,932

2,500

2,048

100,909

100,180

publication date

1848-1870

1871-1900

1901-1920

272

540

416

4,736,834

14,964,428

14,833,122

2,201

2,316

2,048

99,954

100,780

100,909

text length

very short texts

short texts

medium texts

long texts

425

461

196

145

2,327,416

9,250,959

10,741,578

12,214,431

2,048

10,029

40,001

70,208

9,959

39,878

69,387

100,909