Hilger, Agnes
Together with Ms Fabienne Fulst
PhD spokesperson since 27 March 2025.
Dissertation topic:
"The character description in the novel of the long 19th century." (working title)
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Institute of German Philology
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Würzburg
Am Hubland
D - 97074 Würzburg
First supervisor: Prof. Dr Fotis Jannidis
Second supervisors:
Prof. Dr Maximilian Bergengruen
Prof. Dr Christof Schöch (Univ. Trier)
Class in the Graduate School: "Digital Humanities"
Doctorate in the Graduate School from WS 2022/2023.
Abstract:
The thesis deals with the development of character description in the novel between 1789 and 1914, based on quantitative studies of English-language literature, which have shown that concrete words tend to increase in fictional narrative texts over the course of the 19th century. These include words that denote colours or body parts. Preliminary work suggests that there is a similar trend in German-language novels and that this particularly concerns words describing buildings, interiors and people. The aim of the dissertation is to gain a better understanding of the changes in writing processes to which these trends are linked by taking a closer look at the area of character description. The dissertation hopes to make progress in terms of knowledge by combining distant and close reading. By using methods from computational literary studies, it broadens the focus of previous literary research on character description to include a larger number of texts. In doing so, she attempts to highlight developments that go beyond conventional epochal boundaries. At the same time, the quantitative analyses are interlinked with close readings of the texts, so that it is possible to describe more precisely what happens in the texts from a qualitative perspective.
