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Digital Approaches to Poetic Style
A Quantitative Stylistic Analysis of Italian Petrarchism
Abstract Petrarch can be considered one of the most influential poets of European literature. One of the main reasons for this is his collection of Italian love poems known as Canzoniere, which for centuries became a role model for many European poets trying to imitate Petrarch’s poetic style. Research has acknowledged Petrarch’s influence on later poetry and even created a term to describe this phenomenon: Petrarchism. Yet, despite the many studies describing Petrarch’s impact on various European authors and texts, the notion of Petrarchism itself continues to be under discussion. This article raises the question to what extent digital methods can provide new impulses for research on Petrarchism. More specifically, a quantitative stylometric analysis of a corpus of Italian love poetry is conducted to find stylistically distinctive elements for Petrarchism.
Keywords: Petrarch, Petrarchism, stylo, quantitative analysis, contrastive analysis
