The Psychology of Summer: A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of Seasonal Emotion in Chinese and Western Literary Essays

This study is set within the broader context of seasonal archetypes in literature, drawing on Northrop Frye’s (2015) Theory of Myths and Genre, which links the four seasons with recurring literary and psychological patterns. Summer, while often treated as a temporal backdrop, plays a vital role in literary representations across cultures and functions as a symbolic construct rich in emotional and psychological meaning. However, few studies have systematically compared how Chinese and foreign essayists portray summer from a psychological perspective using a corpus-based approach. To address this gap, the present research investigates the emotional significance of summer by analyzing 14 classic essays—seven by Chinese authors and seven by foreign authors—selected from representative Chinese and Western literary works. Emotional tags were first extracted, followed by word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging using MyTxtSegTag. AntConc was then employed to identify high-frequency emotional feature words and adjectives. The emotional tendencies of each text were assessed by combining keyword frequency analysis with thematic interpretation, uncovering the emotional tone and psychological meanings embedded in the discourse. The findings show that summer typically evokes joyful and fulfilling life experiences in both corpora, with frequent emotional keywords such as longing, comfort, innocence, freedom, joy, beauty, brightness, abundance, brilliance, and delight. Notably, foreign authors tend to express emotional states with greater vividness and intensity than their Chinese counterparts. The study concludes that summer is consistently associated with positive psychological meanings in both Chinese and Western literary traditions. This study enhances cross-cultural literary psychology and offers a corpus-based approach for analyzing seasonal imagery in literature.