The Longue Durée of Literary Prestige

TLDR: The authors studied the stylistic differences associated with literary prominence across a century and found that there is a steady tendency for new volumes of poetry to change by slightly exaggerating certain features that defined prestige in the recent past.

Abstract: A history of literary prestige needs to study both works that achieved distinction and the mass of volumes from which they were distinguished. To understand how those patterns of preference changed across a century, we gathered two samples of English-language poetry from the period 1820–1919: one drawn from volumes reviewed in prominent periodicals and one selected at random from a large digital library (in which the majority of authors are relatively obscure). The stylistic differences associated with literary prominence turn out to be quite stable: a statistical model trained to distinguish reviewed from random volumes in any quarter of this century can make predictions almost as accurate about the rest of the period. The “poetic revolutions” described by many histories are not visible in this model; instead, there is a steady tendency for new volumes of poetry to change by slightly exaggerating certain features that defined prestige in the recent past.

Figures

Figure 2. The same model, with outliers and interesting cases labeled

Figure 3. Amodel trained only on volumes from1845 to 1869makes predictions about the whole century

Table 1. Periodicals sampled

Figure 1. A model of literary prestige from 1820 to 1919