Beautiful lips and porcelain cheeks: Extracting physical descriptions from recent Dutch fiction

Chick-lit novels have often been researched in literary theory, but never on the same plane as literary novels. Claims on the relative importance of physicality in chick lit are not based on an actual comparison. We therefore investigate the descriptions of characters’ physical appearance in a corpus of chick-lit and literary novels. We have manually annotated sentences where the appearance of a character is described. The results contradict claims that chick lit would have more physical descriptions because it is more preoccupied with physicality. We then apply a machine learning methodology and manually write lexical-syntactic queries to automate the extraction of these descriptions. When we use a combination of the two automated methods, the extraction of physical descriptions from chick lit is more successful, which suggests that such descriptions are more uniform in character.