Home as a Cultural Metaphor for Housing Space in Contemporary Literature

Abstract

As a mirror image of social reality, literary works frequently use the image of “home” to carry complex cultural connotations of housing space. The concept of “home” in contemporary literature goes beyond the simple living space and becomes an important metaphor for carrying complex social and cultural meanings. In this study, we use a combination of text mining and sentiment analysis, bag-of-words model, TF-IDF algorithm and LDA theme model to systematically analyze “home” in contemporary literature. The keywords are extracted from the jieba thesaurus, the co-occurrence matrix is constructed, the clustering analysis is performed by SPSS, and the sentiment tendency is evaluated based on the Boson NLP Sentiment Dictionary. It is found that “home” in contemporary literature mainly presents four thematic dimensions: spatial alienation and material dilemma, identity loss and belonging anxiety, power structure and intergenerational conflict, emotional alienation and spiritual dilemma. The word frequency statistics show that Living dilemma ranks first with 1146 times, and Property maze ranks second with 973 times. The results of sentiment analysis showed that readers' negative attitudes toward such literature accounted for 73.76%, and positive emotions only accounted for 26.24%. The study reveals the deeper connotation of “home” as a cultural metaphor of housing space in contemporary literature, and provides a new perspective for understanding the cultural expression of housing problems in modern society.