This dataset was created to analyse the narrative structure and rhythm of the prose romance Rivall Friendship attributed to Bridget Manningham. The analysis and results are presented, discussed and contextualised in the book chapter "Narrative Rhythm and Genre in Rivall Friendship" in Discovering Bridget Manningham’s Rivall Friendship: A Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Romance, edited by Jean Brink and accepted for publication by Amsterdam UP in January 2024.
The book chapter argues that Manningham combines traditional romance content with strategies of narration that foreshadow the development of the novel as a genre. The narrative frame of Rivall Friendship contains two embedded and interwoven narratives, related respectively in the third and first person by two female narrators to a mostly female audience. After contextualising the overall narrative structure of Rivall Friendship with respect to macrostructural patterns found in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose narratives, the chapter illustrates how the two inset narrations differ in terms of narrative rhythm on the basis of a computational analysis. Manningham thereby opposes a third-person narrative which allows for immersion in a romance world through long segments of uninterrupted narration to a first-person autobiographical account shaped as part of a social conversation and with a narrative rhythm that anticipates the chapter or letter structure of eighteenth-century novels.
A detailed description of the files contained in the dataset can be found in the accompanying Readme.txt.