Work

Features of Timelessness: Intermediate Report on a Quest for Stylistic Features that Mark Literary Canonicity.

Year: 2023

Type: preprint

Abstract: We report on our ongoing quest to establish a validated complex of stylistic features that act as markers for literary canonicity, in specific contexts. Currentely we present a stylometric analysis of literature investigating the stylistic markers that differentiate former bestsellers from fiction that remains popular across several decades using a TfIdf vectorization of texts and UMAP dimenision reduction approach. We find that especially a greater variation in sentence length is associated with the chances of a novel to remain popular.

Source: SocArXiv (OSF Preprints)

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/nhbq7

Authors: Joris J. van Zundert, Raymond A. Mar, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Isabel Bowman, Emily Temple, Farzaneh Heidari, Anh Truong Phuong Nguyen

Institutions: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Huygens Institute for History and Culture of the Netherlands, York University, University of Amsterdam, University of Toronto

Language: English

Topic: Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W3046517752

Cites: 6

Cited by:

Related to: 10