1. Brief summary of the research topic

In this talk, I present one possible approach to analysing chromatic and light-related spectra in the fictional worlds of the leading Czech Romantic writer Karel Hynek Mácha. Using quantitative and statistical methods, we will address the question of which structural principles organise the fictional worlds of Mácha’s prose with respect to their colour and light configurations. In literary prose, colours and lighting are not random features but manifestations of textual intention; together with other components of textual structure and the structure of fictional worlds, they contribute to the overall semantic profile of the work.

If we aim to identify the basic organisational principles of colourfulness and brightness in fictional worlds (in our case, Romantic prose), quantitative and statistical methods are an appropriate choice because they yield objectifiable evidence that can subsequently be interpreted within literary scholarship. The talk will employ both simple quantitative procedures, such as frequency analyses of the so-called basic colour terms, and statistical and corpus-based methods, including PCA, as well as context-oriented techniques such as concordances and collocation analyses. The results will be presented through a series of visualisations (bar charts, PCA plots) and structured tables (collocations, concordances) and will be compared with results produced by a RAG agent.