English Literature and Changing Ideas of Identity in Modern Fiction

Dr. Abu Farah Hoque

Assistant Professor, Department of English

Maharani Kasiswari College, 20

Ramkanto Bose Street, Kolkata -700003

(affiliated to the University of Calcutta, India)

ORCID ID: 0009-0008-6127-9654

Abstract — Modern English fiction increasingly presents identity as fluid, relational, contested, and continuously reconstructed rather than as a stable attribute inherited from nationality, gender, class, or cultural origin.
This study investigates how contemporary fictional narratives encode transformations of personal and social identity through character language, interpersonal relationships, spatial displacement, memory, and changing narrative positions. A major research gap exists because conventional literary scholarship primarily interprets such transformations through close reading, whereas computational literary studies frequently quantify characters without adequately modelling the temporal evolution of their identities. The proposed study therefore develops a computational-humanistic framework integrating contextual language modelling, semantic trajectory analysis, character-network analysis, and interpretable machine-learning techniques.
Modern fiction published across culturally diverse English-language literary traditions is conceptualized as a longitudinal narrative environment in which characters’ linguistic and relational profiles can be traced across successive narrative segments. The framework is designed to identify semantic identity shifts associated with belonging, alienation, gendered subjectivity, migration, social recognition, cultural hybridity, and self-redefinition.
Keywords — modern English fiction, identity representation, computational literary studies, natural language processing, character networks, semantic change

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