Theme and genre classifications in the works of Wilkie Collins (1824-89) have been extensively investigated using different literary approaches; these are usually based on textual content and biographical considerations. Different critics place Collins’ works under the two main headings of detective fiction and sensation fiction. Such analyses have been generated by what is referred to as the ‘philological method’; that is, by an individual critic’s reading of the relevant material and their intuitive abstraction of generalizations from that reading. A problem with such an approach is that it is not objective, and it is therefore unreliable. The research question is thus asked in response to the subjectivity of previous genre classifications of the novels of Wilkie Collins and the lack of agreement among literary critics and researchers about such classifications. As such, I ask whether an objective and conceptually useful reading of the themes and subjects of Wilkie Collins’ prose fiction texts can be developed. As thus, computational lexical-semantics is suggested to understand the issues of thematic classification. For this purpose, vector space clustering (VSC) was used for capturing the lexical-semantic features of his novels and linking them explicitly to the relevant themes and genres. It is suggested that through this method, an objective, replicable, and reliable genre classification of Collins’ novels is possible. The results of this study can serve as a basis for future studies and criticisms of Wilkie Collins’ fiction.

中文翻译：

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威尔基柯林斯的侦探小说和情感小说：计算词汇语义分析

威尔基柯林斯（1824-89）作品中的主题和体裁分类已经使用不同的文学方法进行了广泛的研究。这些通常基于文本内容和传记考虑。不同的评论家将柯林斯的作品归入侦探小说和轰动小说两大标题之下。这种分析是通过所谓的“语言学方法”产生的；也就是说，通过个人评论家对相关材料的阅读以及他们从阅读中对概括的直观抽象。这种方法的一个问题是它不客观，因此不可靠。因此，为了回应威尔基柯林斯小说先前的体裁分类的主观性以及文学评论家和研究人员对此类分类缺乏共识而提出研究问题。因此，我问是否可以对威尔基柯林斯散文小说文本的主题和主题进行客观和概念上有用的阅读。因此，建议使用计算词汇语义来理解主题分类问题。为此，向量空间聚类 (VSC) 被用于捕捉他小说的词汇语义特征，并将它们明确地与相关主题和体裁联系起来。建议通过这种方法，对柯林斯小说进行客观的、可复制的、可靠的体裁分类是可能的。