Agonistic Structure in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century, with a Case Study of Jane Austen

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It's the first study to deploy a model of human nature as a quantifiable set of categories for an analysis of a big body of important fiction. It demonstrates that this sort of thing can be done and that significant conclusions can be derived from it.

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Fictional characters in novels are created by the psychological processes of real human authors, and these characters produce psychological reactions in real human readers. Therefore, the analysis of fiction writing and consumption can reveal much about human nature. Although various psychological analyses of literature have been around for a long time, many of these analyses have been limited by the personal and subjective opinions of the investigator or by the investigator's attachments to out-of-date frameworks such as Freudian theory. Most prior analyses also lack strong quantitative methods. Because we couch our study in an objective evolutionary framework and employ sound psychometric methods, we believe our study makes a unique contribution to understanding human nature through literature.

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