Authorship Identification Of Disputed Literary Works

At home and broad, over the past hundreds of years considerable effort wasexpended on attempts to try to identify authorship of crucial religious texts, significantliterary works, and other texts of extreme importance. A very recent heatedly discussedcase is the “Ghostwriting Allegation” of Han Han. It was alleged that Han Han’s bestknown novel Triple Door was in effect written by his father Han Renjun.A conventional approach to resolve problems of questioned authorship takes theapproach of stylometry (the analysis of stylistics). A new theory—the theory of Idiolectsimilar to stylometry was developed in western countries in recent years. This papercompares and analyzes writings of Han Han and Han Renjun, taking advantage of theTheory of Idiolect (Idiolect for short) and the DIT (DIT for short) for the purpose ofexploring whether the actual author of Triple Door is Han Han or Han Renjun.Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are taken to conduct this study.Qualitative study mainly comes along with the theory of Idiolect while quantitativeapproach, taking advantage of the statistics software SPSS, primarily comes along withDIT. For instance, an ANOVA, or T-test, or Correlation test is done to explore whetherthe15Ws drawn from DIT are capable of identifying questioned discourses. Moreover,an experiment is designed to verify whether DIT is qualified to identify questionedauthorship of literary works first.The present study, despite some limitations, has been justified by its significanceand implications. It combines the conventional approach with a fresh one—a quantitativeDIT approach to identify questioned authorship of Triple Door. Moreover, it attempts todevelop the theory of idiolect to the structural level instead of staying at the lexical level.Most importantly, a comprehensive set of features characterizing DIT and Idiolect areextracted to discriminate literary works with questioned authorship. After in-depthanalysis between Triple Door and Han Renjun’s works and between Han Han’s recentlypublished blog posts, it is found that the disputed novel Triple Door is extremely likely tohave been written by Han Han.