Edited by* Michael S. Gazzaniga, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, and approved March 13, 2012 (received for review September 21, 2011)
Literature is a form of expression whose temporal structure, both in content and style, provides a historical record of the evolution of culture. In this work we take on a quantitative analysis of literary style and conduct the first large-scale temporal stylometric study of literature by using the vast holdings in the Project Gutenberg Digital Library corpus. We find temporal stylistic localization among authors through the analysis of the similarity structure in feature vectors derived from content-free word usage, nonhomogeneous decay rates of stylistic influence, and an accelerating rate of decay of influence among modern authors. Within a given time period we also find evidence for stylistic coherence with a given literary topic, such that writers in different fields adopt different literary styles. This study gives quantitative support to the notion of a literary “style of a time” with a strong trend toward increasingly contemporaneous stylistic influence.
Author contributions: J.M.H., N.J.F., D.C.K., and D.N.R. designed research; J.M.H., N.J.F., D.C.K., and D.N.R. performed research; J.M.H., N.J.F., D.C.K., and D.N.R. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; J.M.H., N.J.F., D.C.K., and D.N.R. analyzed data; and J.M.H., N.J.F., D.C.K., and D.N.R. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1115407109/-/DCSupplemental.
