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

1. 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.

Joris J. Van Zundert (joris.van.zundert@huygens.knaw.nl), Department of Literary Studies, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands – Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Raymond A. Mar , Department of Psychology, York University. Toronto, Canada, Karina van Dalen–Oskam , Department of Literary Studies, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands – Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Emily Temple , Literary Hub, Isabel Bowman , Department of Psychology, University of Toronto. Toronto, Canada, Farzaneh Heidari , Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, York University. Toronto, Canada and Ahn T.P. Nguyen , Department of Psychology, York University. Toronto, Canada

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