A Hyper-Concordance to the Works of Henry James

My warmest thanks go to Richard Hathaway, who was kind enough to have donated plain text versions of his digitized James works here.

This Hyper-Concordance is written in C++, a program that scans and displays lines based on a command entered by the user. The main advantage of the C++ program is that it not only identifies the concordance lines but the words occurring to the left and the right of the word or phrase searched. It also reports the total number of text lines, the total word count and the number of occurrences of the word or phrase searched. The full text of the book is displayed in a box at the bottom of the screen. Each line of the text is numbered, and the line number and the term(s) searched provide a link to the full text.

The Hyper-Concordance displays two pull-down boxes. The user can first choose one of a selection of authors from the box and then one from a list of the author's works. There are four limiting options displayed before searching: Case sensitive, Non-alphabet character sensitive, head length and tail length. The searcher can also ascertain the book's total word count and vocabulary distribution by searching without a query. This web-based KWIC concordance (Key Word in Context) offers a clear survey of Victorian literary texts.

Windows 2000/XP and the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer are recommended for the best and quickest viewing of the Hyper-Concordance website. Macintosh users are warned that it can take some time to run the concordance program. After clicking on a line number in the list of "hits," be patient if nothing seems to be happening. It may take a while for the complete text of a long novel to be downloaded so that you can navigate in all of it.


hits since 28 December 2003.

Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University, Japan