Abstract
A stylistic analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is used to illustrate the literary value of simple quantitative text and corpus data. Cultural and literary aspects of the book are briefly discussed. It is then shown that data on the frequencies and distributions of individual words and recurrent phraseology can not only provide a more detailed descriptive basis for widely accepted literary interpretations of the book, but also identify significant linguistic features which literary critics seem not to have noticed. The argument provides a response to scepticism of quantitative stylistics from both linguists and literary critics.
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