Canonical Status and Literary Influence: A Comparative Study of Danish Novels from the Modern Breakthrough (1870–1900)

Pascale Feldkamp, Alie Lassche, Jan Kostkan, Márton Kardos, Kenneth Enevoldsen, Katrine Baunvig, Kristoffer Nielbo


Abstract
We examine the relationship between the canonization of Danish novels and their textual innovation and influence, taking the Danish Modern Breakthrough era (1870–1900) as a case study. We evaluate whether canonical novels introduced a significant textual novelty in their time, and explore their influence on the overall literary trend of the period. By analyzing the positions of canonical versus non-canonical novels in semantic space, we seek to better understand the link between a novel’s canonical status and its literary impact. Additionally, we examine the overall diversification of Modern Breakthrough novels during this significant period of rising literary readership. We find that canonical novels stand out from both the historical novel genre and non-canonical novels of the period. Our findings on diversification within and across groups indicate that the novels now regarded as canonical served as literary trendsetters of their time.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlp4dh-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, USA
Editors:
Mika Hämäläinen, Emily Öhman, So Miyagawa, Khalid Alnajjar, Yuri Bizzoni
Venue:
NLP4DH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
140–155
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4dh-1.14
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Cite (ACL):
Pascale Feldkamp, Alie Lassche, Jan Kostkan, Márton Kardos, Kenneth Enevoldsen, Katrine Baunvig, and Kristoffer Nielbo. 2024. Canonical Status and Literary Influence: A Comparative Study of Danish Novels from the Modern Breakthrough (1870–1900). In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, pages 140–155, Miami, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Canonical Status and Literary Influence: A Comparative Study of Danish Novels from the Modern Breakthrough (1870–1900) (Feldkamp et al., NLP4DH 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4dh-1.14.pdf