Sentiment Analysis in Literary Studies. A Critical Survey

The article sets up a critique of Sentiment Analysis (SA) tools in literary studies, both from a theoretical and a computational point of view. In the first section, a possible use of SA in narratology and reader response studies is discussed, highlighting the gaps between literary theories and computational models, and suggesting possible solutions to fill them. In the second section, a stratified taxonomy of SA tools is proposed, which distinguishes: (1) the emotion theory adopted by the tool; (2) the method used to build the emotion resources; (3) the technique adopted to accomplish the analysis. A critical survey of six representative SA tools for literary studies (Syuzhet, Vader, SentiArt, SEANCE, Stanford SA, and Transformers Pipelines) closes the article.