AbstractNetwork analysis as a method has applications in a wide range of fields from physics to epidemiology and from sociology to political science, and in the meantime has also reached the literary studies. Networks can be leveraged to examine intertextual relations or even artistic influences, but the main application so far has been the analysis of social formations and character interactions within fictional worlds. To make this possible, texts have to be formalized into a set of nodes and

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... edges, where nodes represent characters and edges describe the relations between these characters in a very simple fashion: Do they or don't they interact? Based on a selection of Russian plays and Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, we will describe approaches to the social network analysis of literary texts.