Literary texts and the state of the language: The role of the computer

We should follow Mark Olsen's lead and think with maximum ambition of the role of the computer in supporting literary research of the highest order. Thus the computer enables us to answer one of the great questions of literary criticism: how does a given writer contribute to the changing language? We can now chart the influence of given writers by correlating their words and phrasing with computerized dictionaries so as to produce profiles and histories of the way words have entered the language.Dennis Taylor is a professor of English at Boston College and a nineteenth century specialist. His two most recent books areHardy's Metres and Victorian Prosody andHardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology, both from Clarendon Press, Oxford.