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Literary Corpora

Literary corpora comprise poetry and fictional prose texts, such as novels, short stories and plays. They bring together the collected works of a single author or representative texts from a specific literary period. Since literary corpora are often available through powerful concordancers, they are especially well suited for a quantitative and qualitative approach to comparative literary analysis, within or across different genres and historical periods.

The CLARIN infrastructure gives access to 45 literary corpora. The majority of the corpora are monolingual and cover 16 languages (Croatian, Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Latvian, North Saami, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Slovenian, Sumerian and Swedish). 

For comments, changes of the existing content or inclusion of new corpora, send us an resource-families [at] clarin.eu (email).

 

Literary corpora in the CLARIN infrastructure

Monolingual corpora

Corpus Language Description Availability

One-million Corpus of Croatian Literary Language

Size: 1 million tokens

Croatian The corpus is listed in the LINDAT repository.  

Johannes V. Jensen Corpus

Size: 1,760,093 words, 8,489 pages 
Annotation: unannotated 
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Danish

This corpus presents the collected works of the Danish author Johannes Jensen.

The corpus is available for download from CLARIN-DK and for online browsing through a dedicated concordancer.

Browse

Download

Complete Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

Annotation: none

English (Old) This corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface. Browse

York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry

Size: 71,490 words 
Annotation: MSD-tagged, syntactically parsed 
Licence: Restricted

English (Old)

This corpus contains a selection of poetic texts (71,490 words) from the Old English Section of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.

The corpus is available for download from the Oxford Text Archive.

Download

Collection of older original Estonian-language works of fiction

Size: 173 texts 
Licence: CLARIN ACA

Estonian

This corpus collects older Estonian literary texts published on "Kreutzwald's Century: the Estonian Cultural History Web". The electronically republished books, included in the collection, are based on the first editions of works by more important Estonian authors, published in 1854-1944.

The corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface.

Browse

Corpus of Estonian fiction

Size: 5,768,504 words 
Licence: CLARIN ACA - NC

Estonian

This corpus contains texts from 1990 onwards.

The corpus is available for download from CELR.

Download

Estonian Runic Songs' Database

Size: 92,134 texts 
Licence: CLARIN ACA

Estonian

These are the oldest text recordings of Estonian runic songs (the text recordings were created in the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century). In addition to the runic songs, the database also has songs of transitional form and end-rhymed songs (about 6000).

The corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface.

Browse

Classics of English and American Literature in Finnish (CEAL)

Size: 3 novels, 484,010 tokens 
Annotation: MSD-tagged, syntactically parsed 
Licence: CLARIN RES + NC

Finnish

This corpus contains Finnish translations of the following three texts: Jane Austen: Ylpeys ja ennakkoluulo (Pride and Prejudice), translated by Kersti Juva, Teos 2013; Henry James: Washingtonin aukio (Washington Square), translated by Kersti Juva, Otava 2003; Charles Dickens: Kolea talo (Bleak House), translated by Kersti Juva, Tammi, 2006.

The corpus is available for online browsing through Korp in two versions - Version 1 (Sentences and Paragraphs in the Original Order) and Version 2 (Scrambled Paragraphs))

Browse (original)

Browse (scrambled)

Classics of Finnish Literature, Kielipankki Version

Size: 1,500,000 words 
Annotation: syntactically parsed (TDT alpha), named entities (FiNER), MSD-tagged, lemmatized 
Licence: EUPL v.1.1 SA

Finnish

This corpus contains prose fiction, plays, poetry and aphorisms (some written originally in Swedish) of established Finnish authors published from 1880s to 1949.

The corpus is available for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

Corpus of Early Literary Finnish

 

Finnish The corpus of Early Modern Finnish contains Finnish-language works in various fields published during the 19th century, annual issues of the oldest periodicals and newspapers, almanac and decree texts, and some dictionaries. An effort has been made to include the earliest, most important and (based on the number of reprints, for example) most widely distributed works. The selection of publications has also been made with a view to achieving the widest possible thematic coverage, although more works originally written in Finnish have been included than translations. These have been alphabetised by the name of their translator, seasonal publications by their title, and other works by their author. The Finnish translations of unknown authors are in the Anonymous folder, the texts of unknown authors in the Other folder. The materials cover the period between Old and Modern English and a little beyond. The earliest book dates from 1809, the latest from 1891, but there are texts of the regulations right up to the end of the century. However, most of the material is from 1810-1880. This later material can also be found in the Classics corpus.  

Corpus of Finnish Literary Classics

Size: 1,456,658 words

Finnish

This corpus contains works by established Finnish fiction writers from the 1880s to the 1930s. There are different types of prose and plays, as well as lyrics and aphorisms.

This corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface.

Browse

Corpus of Old Literary Finnish

Size: 3,428,618 words

Finnish

This corpus contains various works published during the Swedish rule (from the 16th century to about 1810), extensive manuscripts from that period (most of which were later printed), as well as individual almanac and decree texts, sermons and poetry.

This corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface.

Browse

Finnish Corpus (Literature) (UHLCS)

Size: 68,425 words 
Annotation: tagged 
Licence: CLARIN RES

Finnish

This corpus contains samples of Finnish literature published by the WSOY publishing company in the 1990.

The corpus is available online through FIN-CLARIN.

Browse

The Finnish Gutenberg Corpus

Size: 34,487,420 words 
Licence: CC-BY

Finnish

This corpus contains Finnish books made available by the Gutenberg project. The texts have not been linguistically annotated.

The corpus is available for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

The Morpho-Syntactic Database of Mikael Agricola's Works

Size: 83,678 sentences; 428,314 tokens; 38,308 words 
Annotation: MSD-tagged, syntactically parsed 
Licence: CC-BY-ND

Finnish

This corpus contains the Finnish parts of Mikael Agricola’s works (Abckiria, Rukouskiria, Se Wsi testamenti, Käsikiria, Messu, Piina, Psaltari, Veisut, Profeetat).

The corpus is available for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

République-Bastille (1948-1949)

Size: 37,965 words 
Licence: CC-BY

French

This corpus contains République-Bastille, a novel by Melpo Axioti. This French text is of particular linguistic interest since it is a text written in a language other than the author's mother tongue and is suited for research on bilingualism and self-translation. It would be worth measuring the naturalness of the language with computational tools, for example.

The corpus is available for download from clarin:el.

Download

Cultural Thesaurus of the Greek Language

Size: 1 million tokens 
Annotation: semantic 
Licence: proprietary

Greek

This corpus contains prose, poetry, drama, and essays from the 18th century onwards.

The corpus is available for online browsing through a dedicated webpage.

Browse

Greek Medieval Texts

Size: 3,419,553 words 
Licence: CC-BY-NC

Greek (Ancient), Greek (Modern)

This corpus contains medieval texts contains written material covering the period from the 4th till the 16th century A.D. The texts can be classified into the following categories: religious, poetical-literary, political-historical, hymns, epigrams.

The corpus is available for download from clarin:el.

Download

Latvian literature classics

 

Latvian This corpus presents classics from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.  

North Saami Corpus (Literature) (UHLCS)

Size: 17,830 words 
Licence: CLARIN RES +NC +NORED +PLAN

North Sami

This corpus contains Kerttu Vuolab's novel Cheppari cháráhus.

The corpus is available for online browsing through the TAITO shell.

Browse

NorGramBank – Fiction in Norwegian Bokmål

Size: 26,903,637 words; 2,469,916 sentences 
Annotation: syntactically parsed 
Licence: CLARIN ACA

Norwegian (Bokmal) This corpus, which is based on OCR data from the National Library of Norway, is available for online browsing through INESS. Browse

NorGramBank children’s fiction in Norwegian Bokmål

Size: 4,111,213 words; 389,564 sentences 
Annotation: syntactically parsed 
Licence: CLARIN ACA

Norwegian (Bokmal) This corpus, which is based on OCR data from the National Library of Norway, is available for online browsing through INESS. Browse

NorGrambank children's fiction in Norwegian Nynorsk

Size: 1,043,260 words; 106,434 sentences 
Annotation: syntactically parsed 
Licence: CLARIN ACA

Norwegian (Nynorsk) This corpus, which is based on OCR data from the National Library of Norway, is available for online browsing through INESS. Browse

NorGramBank fiction in Norwegian Nynorsk

Size: 2,884,376 words; 260,285 sentences 
Annotation: syntactically parsed 
Licence: CLARIN ACA

Norwegian (Nynorsk) This corpus, which is based on OCR data from the National Library of Norway, is available for online browsing through INESS. Browse

1000 Novels Corpus

Size: 1000 texts 
Licence: CC-BY 4.0

Polish This corpus is available for download from CLARIN-PL. Download

1000PLUS Novels Corpus (1.0)

Size: 1000 texts; 17,352,826 words 
Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Polish This corpus is available for download from CLARIN-PL. Download

Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Polish Novels 

Licence: CC-BY 3.0

Polish This corpus is available for download from CLARIN-PL. Download

POE: Microcorpus of 20th century Polish poetry

Annotation: unannotated 
Licence: plWordNet

Polish This corpus is available for download from CLARIN-PL. Download

LT Corpus

Size: 1,781,083 words 
Annotation: PoS-tagged, lemmatized 
Licence: CLARIN RES

Portuguese

This corpus contains 70 copyright-free classics (61 Portugal and 9 Brazil) published before 1940.

The corpus is available for download from PORTULAN.

Download

Corpus of longer narrative Slovenian prose KDSP 1.0

Size: 262 texts, 11 million words, 14 million tokens 
Annotation: MSD-tagged (MULTEXT-East & UD), lemmatised, annotated with author and text metadata 
Licence: CC-BY 4.0

Slovenian

This corpus contains 262 texts of longer older Slovenian narrative prose. The texts were published between 1836 and 1918 and are at least 20,000 words long.

The texts have bibliographical metadata (author name, title, year of publication, length) and are classified according to the decade of publication, length, text type, text subtype, theme, and level of canonicity (texts by those authors included in school textbooks after 1980 and/or included in the Collected writings of Slovenian poets and writers, are marked with a high degree of canonicity). The metadata about the authors of the texts are provided with their gender, occupation, and years of birth and death. The corpus texts come from three digital sources, and each text is marked for its source. They are Wikisource (145 texts), the ELTeC corpus (96 texts), and the dLib digital library (21 texts). The corpus is provided in two variants, one containing running text and the other with added linguistic analyses. These comprise tokens, sentences, lemmas, MULTEXT-East morphosytactic descriptions and Universal Dependencies morphological features. The linguistic annotation was performed with the CLASSLA program. The source format of the corpus in /XML, with two derived formats also available: one is plain text, and the other vertical files, as used by concordances, like the CWB.

The corpus is available for download from CLARIN.SI as well as through the noSketchEngine and KonText concordancers.

Browse (noSketchEngine)

Browse (KonText)

Download

The corpus of older Slovenian narrative prose PriLit 1.0

Size: 43 texts; 1,275,209 tokens 
Annotation: word modernisation, lemmatisation, syntactic annotation (Universal Dependencies
Licence: CC BY 4.0

Slovenian

This corpus contains texts of older Slovenian narrative prose by 12 authors.

The corpus is available for download from the CLARIN.SI repository.

Download

Banco de Datos de Once Novelas Españolas 1951—1971 (SOL) (2014-10-08)

Size: 1,267,391 tokens; 69,270 sentences 
Annotation: sentence scrambled 
Licence: CC-BY 4.0

Spanish This corpus is available for download from SWE-CLARIN and for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

Download

Electronic corpus of 15th-century Castilian cancionero manuscripts

 

Spanish

This is a lyric corpus of 15th century cancioneros.

The corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface.

Browse

Electronic text corpus of Sumerian literature (ETCSL)

Size: 400 literary compositions

Sumerian

This corpus presents a selection of nearly 400 literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE.

The corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface.

Browse

August Strindberg's novels (2017-10-16)

Size: 4,309,037 tokens; 321,759 sentences 
Annotation: sentence scrambling 
Licence: CC-BY 4.0

Swedish

This corpus presents the collected works of August Strindberg.

The corpus is available for download from SWE-CLARIN and for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

Download

Bonnier novels I (1976/77) (2017-10-04)

Size: 6,578,675 tokens; 462,625 sentences 
Annotation: sentence scrambling 
Licence: CC-BY 4.0

Swedish

This corpus presents 69 Bonnier novels from 1976-77.

The corpus is available for download from SWE-CLARIN and for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

Download

Bonnier novels II (1980/81) (2017-03-17)

Size: 4,304,271 tokens; 298,361 sentences 
Annotation: sentence scrambling 
Licence: CC-BY 4.0

Swedish

This corpus presents 60 Bonnier novels from 1980-81.

The corpus is available for download from SWE-CLARIN and for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

Download

Multilingual corpora

Corpus Language Description Availability

MULTEXT-East "1984" annotated corpus 4.0 

Size: 12 texts; 79,718 sentences; 1,064,424 words 
Annotation: sentence-alignment, MSD tagging 
Licence: CC BY-NC SA 4.0

Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, Hungarian, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian

This is Parallel corpus of George Orwell's 1984 and its translations.

The corpus is available for download from CLARIN.SI.

Download

Anthology of Middle English texts / Santiago Gonzalez y Fernandez-Corugedo

Size: 4,000 words 
Licence: Oxford Text Archive Licence

English (Middle), Hebrew

This corpus contains literary texts from 1100 to 1400.

The corpus is available for download from the Oxford Text Archive.

Download

Finnish Folk Poetry

Size: 7.1 million words 
Annotation: unannotated 
Licence: CC-BY-NC

Finnish, Karelian, Ludian, Latin, Swedish, Olonets, Izhorian, Votic

This corpus contains poems from 1564 to 1939.

The corpus is available for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

ParFin 2016, Finnish-Russian Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts

Size: 2,044,172 tokens 
Annotation: MSD-tagged, syntactically parsed 
Licence: CLARIN RES +NC +INF +ND

Finnish, Russian

This corpus contains Finnish literary texts from 1990-2010 and their translations into Russian aligned at sentence level.

The corpus is available for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

ParRus 2016, Russian-Finnish Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts

Size: 5,900,000 tokens 
Annotation: MSD-tagged, syntactically parsed 
Licence: CLARIN RES +NC +INF +ND

Finnish, Russian

This corpus contains Russian literary texts (classical literature & 20th century) and their translations into Finnish aligned at paragraph level.

The corpus is available for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

Aleksis Kivi Corpus (SKS)

Size: 413,735 words 
Annotation: MSD-tagged, syntactically parsed 
Licence: CC-BY-NC

Finnish, Swedish

This corpus contains all the known letters, manuscripts and published works by Finnish author Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872). Most of the texts were written in Finnish while some of the letters and manuscripts are in Swedish. The time coverage of the texts: 1855-1871.

The corpus is available for online browsing through Korp.

Browse

Classics Library of the National Library of Finland - Kielipankki version

Licence: CC-BY

Finnish, Swedish

This corpus contains literary texts from 1549 to 1944.

The corpus is available for online browsing through FIN-CLARIN.

Browse

aformes

Size: 376,250 words 
Licence: CC-BY-NC

Greek (Modern), English

This corpus contains fiction texts from a journal of undergraduate creative writing at the Faculty of English Language and Literature.

The corpus is available for download from clarin:el.

Download