Introduction
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 from a specific literary period. Since the 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 44 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 email.
This website was last updated on 23 July 2021.
Literary corpora in the CLARIN infrastructure
Monolingual corpora
| Corpus | Language | Description | Availability |
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One-million Corpus of Croatian Literary Language Size: 1 million tokens |
Croatian |
The corpus is listed in the LINDAT repository. |
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Size: 1,760,093 words, 8,489 pages |
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. |
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Complete Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Poetry Annotation: none |
English (Old) |
This corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface. |
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York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry Size: 71,490 words |
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. |
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Collection of older original Estonian-language works of fiction Size: 173 texts |
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. |
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Size: 5,768,504 words |
Estonian |
This corpus contains texts from 1990 onwards. The corpus is available for download from CELR. |
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Estonian Runic Songs' Database Size: 92,134 texts |
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. |
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Classics of English and American Literature in Finnish (CEAL) Size: 3 novels, 484,010 tokens |
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)) |
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Classics of Finnish Literature, Kielipankki Version Size: 1,500,000 words |
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. |
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Finnish Corpus (Literature) (UHLCS) Size: 68,425 words |
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. |
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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. |
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Corpus of Early Literary Finnish
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Finnish |
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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. |
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Size: 34,487,420 words |
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. |
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The Morpho-Syntactic Database of Mikael Agricola's Works Size: 83,678 sentences; 428,314 tokens; 38,308 words |
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. |
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RĂ©publique-Bastille (1948-1949) Size: 37,965 words |
French |
This corpus contains RĂ©publique-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. |
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Cultural Thesaurus of the Greek Language Size: 1 million tokens |
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. |
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Size: 3,419,553 words |
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. |
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Latvian |
This corpus presents classics from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. |
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North Saami Corpus (Literature) (UHLCS) Size: 17,830 words |
North Sami |
This corpus contains Kerttu Vuolab's novel Cheppari cháráhus. The corpus is available for online browsing through the TAITO shell. |
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NorGramBank – Fiction in Norwegian Bokmål Size: 26,903,637 words; 2,469,916 sentences |
Norwegian (Bokmal) |
This corpus, which is based on OCR data from the National Library of Norway, is available for online browsing through INESS. |
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NorGramBank children’s fiction in Norwegian Bokmål Size: 4,111,213 words; 389,564 sentences |
Norwegian (Bokmal) |
This corpus, which is based on OCR data from the National Library of Norway, is available for online browsing through INESS. |
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NorGrambank children's fiction in Norwegian Nynorsk Size: 1,043,260 words; 106,434 sentences |
Norwegian (Nynorsk) |
This corpus, which is based on OCR data from the National Library of Norway, is available for online browsing through INESS. |
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NorGramBank fiction in Norwegian Nynorsk Size: 2,884,376 words; 260,285 sentences |
Norwegian (Nynorsk) |
This corpus, which is based on OCR data from the National Library of Norway, is available for online browsing through INESS. |
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Size: 1000 texts |
Polish |
This corpus is available for download from CLARIN-PL. |
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Size: 1000 texts; 17,352,826 words |
Polish |
This corpus is available for download from CLARIN-PL. |
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Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Polish Novels Licence: CC-BY 3.0 |
Polish |
This corpus is available for download from CLARIN-PL. |
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POE: Microcorpus of 20th century Polish poetry Annotation: unannotated |
Polish |
This corpus is available for download from CLARIN-PL. |
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Size: 1,781,083 words |
Portuguese |
This corpus contains 70 copyright-free classics (61 Portugal and 9 Brazil) published before 1940. The corpus is available for download from PORTULAN. |
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The corpus of older Slovenian narrative prose PriLit 1.0 Size: 43 texts; 1,275,209 tokens |
Slovenian |
This corpus contains texts of older Slovenian narrative prose by 12 authors. The corpus is available for download from the CLARIN.SI repository. |
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Banco de Datos de Once Novelas Españolas 1951—1971 (SOL) (2014-10-08) Size: 1,267,391 tokens; 69,270 sentences |
Spanish |
This corpus is available for download from SWE-CLARIN and for online browsing through Korp. |
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Electronic corpus of 15th-century Castilian cancionero manuscripts
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Spanish |
This is a lyric corpus of 15th century cancioneros. The corpus is available for online browsing through an external interface. |
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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. |
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August Strindberg's novels (2017-10-16) Size: 4,309,037 tokens; 321,759 sentences |
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. |
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Bonnier novels I (1976/77) (2017-10-04) Size: 6,578,675 tokens; 462,625 sentences |
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. |
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Bonnier novels II (1980/81) (2017-03-17) Size: 4,304,271 tokens; 298,361 sentences |
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. |
Multilingual corpora
| Corpus | Language | Description | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
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MULTEXT-East "1984" annotated corpus 4.0 Size: 12 texts; 79,718 sentences; 1,064,424 words |
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. |
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Anthology of Middle English texts / Santiago Gonzalez y Fernandez-Corugedo Size: 4,000 words |
English (Middle), Hebrew |
This corpus contains literary texts from 1100 to 1400. The corpus is available for download from the Oxford Text Archive. |
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Size: 7.1 million words |
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. |
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ParFin 2016, Finnish-Russian Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts Size: 2,044,172 tokens |
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. |
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ParRus 2016, Russian-Finnish Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts Size: 5,900,000 tokens |
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. |
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Size: 413,735 words |
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. |
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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. |
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Size: 376,250 words |
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. |