Discovering the Douro Literary Landscape in “A Noiva De Caná” from António Cabral through Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

In the context of literary landscapes, this paper aims to identify, characterize and map the landscapes lived by the main characters of the novel "A Noiva de Caná", by the poet and dramaturg of the Douro region, António Cabral. In this novel, the author leads us on a discursive journey attending the characters' life circuits, which involve spatiality, social interaction, cultural and religious values and living standards of the region, written in the third quarter of the 20th century. At the methodological and technical level, the novel was digitized, and the excerpts that allude to the landscape included on the Atlas Project of Literary Landscapes of Continental Portugal (IELT-FCSH and ICH-FL), important research support concerning the Douro’ territory and its mapping. This project based on the foundations of ecocriticism, a conceptual field within the framework of cultural studies, constructed on a strongly interdisciplinary matrix aimed at strengthening environmental awareness. Having a literary corpus of national and foreign writers, from the 19th century to the present day, the project displays current and former representations of the landscapes, which allows its reading in several times, a comparative analysis of landscapes of Portugal and an observation of the diachronic evolution of the territories. The corpus was analyzed using computational tools: Concapp, AntConc, and Lexico. Each of these tools allows complementary quantitative readings of the lexical units (wordlist, frequencies, concordances, collocates, etc.). Since the lexicon reflects the culture of a society, we will observe how the author (i) identifies the territorial marks (the natural elements, the types of occupation of the ground, the settlement, the types of houses, etc.) and, (ii) describes the symbols of the Douro culture (regionalisms that the characters use in dialogues, the description of religious ceremonies and traditional games, etc.), increasing our knowledge about this region and its people.