International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Ch.Leelsowmya
Abstract: Comparative literary research has long relied on close reading and qualitative interpretation, methods that struggle to scale across large corpora or detect latent patterns below the threshold of human perception. This paper introduces a framework of mathematical techniques specifically adapted for comparative analysis across authors, periods, languages, and genres. Drawing on current research in stylometry, quantitative prosody, sentiment analysis, and network theory, we demonstrate how statistical distance measures, sequence alignment algorithms, and graph-based representations can reveal structural affinities that traditional methods miss. The paper offers three case-study applications: (1) the use of Burrows’ Delta for cross-author stylistic comparison, (2) the application of local sequence alignment to poetic meter across traditions, and (3) network analysis of character co-occurrence for comparative narrative structure. We conclude by proposing a unified computational workflow for comparative literary research, with open-source tool recommendations and reproducible methodologies.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21425645
