Questão 66718

A master's student in an English literature program is developing a research proposal for her dissertation. She is interested in exploring the representation of female agency in 19th-century novels written by women. Her initial research question is very broad: 'How is female agency portrayed in 19th-century literature?'. Her advisor explains that this question is too vast and lacks a clear methodological focus. The advisor's task is to guide the student in refining her research question and choosing an appropriate method of investigation. The student is familiar with traditional literary criticism, which often involves close reading and historical contextualization. However, the advisor suggests that incorporating methods from the digital humanities could yield new and interesting insights. Specifically, she introduces the student to the idea of 'corpus stylistics' and 'distant reading'. She explains it with a quote from a digital humanities scholar: 'Distant reading is not a substitute for close reading, but a complement to it. By using computational methods to analyze large corpora of texts, we can identify patterns, frequencies, and statistical trends that are invisible to the naked eye. This allows us to ask new kinds of questions about literary history and style.' The advisor suggests the student could build a corpus of novels by 19th-century female authors and use it to investigate her topic quantitatively before diving into close readings.

Which of the following refined research questions is most suitable for an investigation using methods from corpus stylistics and distant reading in the field of English literature?