Towards a Philological Metric through a Topological Data Analysis Approach

Abstract

The canon of the baroque Spanish literature has been thoroughly studied with philological techniques. The major representatives of the poetry of this epoch are Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora y Argote. They are commonly classified by the literary experts in two different streams: Quevedo belongs to the Conceptismo and Góngora to the Culteranismo. Besides, traditionally, even if Quevedo is considered the most representative of the Conceptismo, Lope de Vega is also considered to be, at least, closely related to this literary trend. In this paper, we use Topological Data Analysis techniques to provide a first approach to a metric distance between the literary style of these poets. As a consequence, we reach results that are under the literary experts’ criteria, locating the literary style of Lope de Vega, closer to the one of Quevedo than to the one of Góngora.