Computational Literary Studies

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Overview

Computational Literary Studies uses methods such as stylometry, topic modeling, semantic embeddings, and character or concept networks to study literature across languages, periods, and large corpora. These approaches help researchers trace changes in style and meaning, compare narrative structures, and find possible sources or intertextual links for closer reading. Large language models are increasingly used to annotate and evaluate texts and to study generated fiction, with benchmarks testing tasks such as poetic comprehension and authorship detection. A central challenge is making computational measurements reliable and interpretable: models can miss context, genre conventions, and culturally specific meanings, so expert validation and careful links between measurements and literary claims remain essential.

Latest papers

CardsList

49 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, up 67% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. 'The Order in the Horse's Heart': A Case Study in LLM-Assisted Stylometry for the Discovery of Biblical Allusion in Modern Literary Fiction

    Apr 21, 2026Ewan CameronComputational Literary StudiesLLM-Assisted Annotation

    Actuarial Mathematics & Statistics, School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK

  2. FocalLens: Visualizing Narratives through Focalization

    Apr 15, 2026S M Raihanul Alam, Md Dilshadur Rahman, Md Naimul HoqueVisual AnalyticsComputational Literary Studies

    University of Iowa · University of Utah

  3. Who Wrote This Line? Evaluating the Detection of LLM-Generated Classical Chinese Poetry

    Apr 11, 2026Jiang Li, Tian Lan, Shanshan Wang +5AI-Generated Text DetectionComputational Literary Studies

    College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University, China · National & Local Joint Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Information Processing Technology for Mongolian, China · NLP2CT Lab, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau, China

  4. Between Century and Poet: Graph-Based Lexical Semantic Change in Persian Poetry

    Apr 8, 2026Kourosh Shahnazari, Seyed Moein Ayyoubzadeh, Mohammadali KeshtparvarSemantic Change DetectionComputational Literary Studies

    Sharif University of Technology · Amirkabir University of Technology

  5. What is Good? Extracting and Testing Implicit Theories of Literary Quality from LLM Reasoning Traces

    Apr 7, 2026Birger MoëllComputational Literary StudiesLLM-as-a-Judge

    Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

  6. A Dynamic Atlas of Persian Poetic Symbolism: Families, Fields, and the Historical Rewiring of Meaning

    Apr 1, 2026Kourosh Shahnazari, Seyed Moein Ayyoubzadeh, Mohammadali KeshtparvarSemantic Change DetectionComputational Literary Studies

    Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. · Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

  7. Narrative Fingerprints: Multi-Scale Author Identification via Novelty Curve Dynamics

    Apr 1, 2026Fred Zimmerman, Hilmar AIAuthorship AttributionStylometry

    Nimble Books LLC / Big Five Killer. · Contributing Editor, RKHS Multiverses Research.

  8. IWLV-Ramayana: A Sarga-Aligned Parallel Corpus of Valmiki's Ramayana Across Indian Languages

    Mar 21, 2026Sumesh VPCorpus LinguisticsComputational Literary Studies

    Insight Publica · Insight World Literature Vault (IWLV), Kerala, India

  9. Hybrid topic modelling for computational close reading: Mapping narrative themes in Pushkin's Evgenij Onegin

    Mar 20, 2026Angelo Maria SabatiniComputational Literary StudiesTopic Modeling

    The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna Pisa, Italy

  10. From Topic to Transition Structure: Unsupervised Concept Discovery at Corpus Scale via Predictive Associative Memory

    Mar 19, 2026Jason DuryUnsupervised Visual Concept DiscoveryText Clustering

    Independent Researcher

  11. Computational Analysis of Semantic Connections Between Herman Melville Reading and Writing

    Mar 15, 2026Nudrat Habib, Elisa Barney Smith, Steven Olsen SmithComputational Literary Studies

    Luleå University of Technology · Boise State University

  12. Creative Convergence or Imitation? Genre-Specific Homogeneity in LLM-Generated Chinese Literature

    Mar 15, 2026Yuanchi Ma, Kaize Shi, Hui He +5Text GenerationComputational Literary Studies

  13. Artificial Intelligence for Sentiment Analysis of Persian Poetry

    Mar 11, 2026Arash Zargar, Abolfazl Moshiri, Mitra Shafaei +3Computational Literary StudiesSentiment Analysis

    Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering; Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence; University of Toronto; Toronto, Canada · Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations; University of Toronto; Toronto, Canada · Independent Researcher +1

  14. Semantic Novelty Trajectories in 80,000 Books: A Cross-Corpus Embedding Analysis

    Mar 2, 2026Fred ZimmermanComputational Literary Studies

    Nimble Books LLC, Ann Arbor, MI

  15. Semantic Novelty at Scale: Narrative Shape Taxonomy and Readership Prediction in 28,606 Books

    Feb 24, 2026W. Frederick ZimmermanComputational Literary Studies

    Nimble Books LLC

  16. Eigenmood Space: Uncertainty-Aware Spectral Graph Analysis of Psychological Patterns in Classical Persian Poetry

    Feb 18, 2026Kourosh Shahnazari, Seyed Moein Ayyoubzadeh, Mohammadali KeshtparvarSpectral Graph EmbeddingComputational Literary Studies

    Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. · Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

  17. Revisiting Northrop Frye's Four Myths Theory with Large Language Models

    Feb 17, 2026Edirlei Soares de Lima, Marco A. Casanova, Antonio L. FurtadoComputational Literary Studies

    Academy for AI, Games and Media, Breda University of Applied Sciences, Breda, The Netherlands · Department of Informatics, PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  18. Semantic Communities and Boundary-Spanning Lyrics in K-pop: A Graph-Based Unsupervised Analysis

    Feb 13, 2026Oktay Karakuş, Can EyüpoğluComputational Literary StudiesGraph Clustering

    Cardiff University, School of Computer Science and Informatics Cardiff, UK

  19. Computational Social Linguistics for Telugu Cultural Preservation: Novel Algorithms for Chandassu Metrical Pattern Recognition

    Sep 23, 2025Boddu Sri Pavan, Boddu Swathi SreeCultural HeritageComputational Literary Studies

    Independent Researcher · Department of Computer Science and Engineering RGUKT, Nuzvid