Female Protagonism and Multilingualism in Spanish Byzantine Novels Analysed Using Character Networks

Abstract

The rediscovery of Greek novels in Europe, in particular Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, together with its literary emulations by Lope de Vega or Miguel de Cervantes, had a deep impact in the renewal of motifs, fictional devices and character descriptions, for example the explicit or implicit presence of foreign languages or the predominance of female characters. The analysis seeks to quantitatively identify the multilingual character and the position of the female protagonists in novels using network analysis. We have approached both aspects from a twofold methodological perspective – first, using taxonomies that help to describe more precisely the concept of multilingualism for quantitative studies; second, making use of measures of centrality to locate the protagonist. Taking into consideration various network metrics together with the language attribution, we can compare the correlation between character importance and languages. The results validate the hypothesis that the novels show a strong thematization of foreign languages, but the female heroines fall behind their male counterparts in protagonism.