Thresholds to the "Great Unread": Titling Practices in Eleven ELTeC Collections

The main aim of the paper is to describe and, to a certain extent, to understand, titling practices in literary discourse through the exploration of a multilingual literary corpus comprising European novels published between 1840 and 1920. The study is based on the analysis of 11 out of the 16 sub-collections of novels in preparation within the COST Action 16204 “Distant reading for European Literary History”, namely the English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian sub-collections. We focus on an analysis of persons, places and genre entities in titles, and observe some regularities involving the “syntax” of these various entities in titles.^[1]

[1] The research described in this paper was conducted in the context of the COST Action “Distant Reading for European Literary History” (CA16204 – “Distant-Reading”). Find more about the Action at: http://www.distant-reading.net. COST is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the EU. The collection encoding and documentation are done by Working Group 1 (https://www.distant-reading.net/wg-1/). The creation, and correction, of ELTeC is an extensive team effort. Therefore, we would like to thank all contributors to ELTeC.