Tracing affective change: topic modeling and emotional semantics of gender in eighteenth-century British fiction

Abstract This article re-examines the changing forms of emotional expression in eighteenth-century British fiction by combining topic modeling with semantic and literary-historical analysis. Scholarship on sentimental and Gothic fiction has long emphasized the importance of tears, sensibility, and heightened affect, yet it remains difficult to determine how such affective vocabularies are distributed across a broader corpus without beginning from a fixed list of preselected emotional terms. For this reason, the study begins with Latent Dirichlet Allocation as an exploratory procedure for mapping recurrent lexical fields in a corpus of seventy-nine novels published between 1719 and 1796. One prominent topic brings together words such as cry, mind, heart, father, answer, and return, suggesting a field of emotional, familial, and interpersonal expression. The discussion then uses the word cry as a point of entry into this affective field, whose eighteenth-century uses range from tearful affect to vocal exclamation and formulaic speech attribution. By combining topic modeling, context-based semantic classification, normalized frequency analysis, gender-based comparison, and a supplementary chunk-level check, the study shows that weeping-related affect becomes especially prominent in female-authored fiction of the late eighteenth century, while mid-century male-authored fiction displays a more limited and historically distinct concentration of sentimental expression.