The representation of mobility in literary narratives has important
implications for the cultural understanding of human movement and migration.
In this paper, we introduce novel methods for measuring the physical mobility
of literary characters through narrative space and time. We capture mobility
through geographically defined space, as well as through generic locations
such as homes, driveways, and forests. Using a dataset of over 13,000 books
published in English since 1789, we observe significant “small world” effects
in fictional narratives. Specifically, we find that fictional characters cover far
less distance than their non-fictional counterparts; the pathways covered by
fictional characters are highly formulaic and limited from a global perspective;
and fiction exhibits a distinctive semantic investment in domestic and private
places. Surprisingly, we do not find that characters’ ascribed gender has a
statistically significant effect on distance traveled, but it does influence the
semantics of domesticity.
This paper has been submitted to the conference track of JCLS. It has been peer reviewed and accepted for presentation and discussion at the 3rd Annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies at Vienna, Austria, in June 2024.
