Sequencing Literary Reception: Trajectories of Russian Novels over the Afterlife Course

Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2024. Aarhus, Denmark. 2024. P. 982–998.

Kim C. S.

The study explores literary recognition as a continuously generating new results process, as opposed to static models. Introducing sequence analysis to cultural analytics, it examines how literary trajectories of Russian pre-revolutionary novels unfold over time (1919-2022). After analyzing variations in publishing trajectories among school and non-school clusters, the paper explores the relationship between school and reprint domains. The results support the idea that there is a positive spillover effect from being included in the school curriculum, as it is an advantage for a long-term publishing career. Conversely, they do not support the idea of a negative spillover effect, as being excluded from the curriculum does not seem to be associated with a deterioration in publishing trajectories. Except for school ones, there is a group of novels characterized as the “second canon,” which have survived on the book market for more than a century.

Keywords: канон, рецепция, количественные методы, sequence analysis, анализ последовательностей, романы, computational methods, социология литературы, культурная аналитика, literary reception, canon/archive, cultural success

Publication based on the results of: Literary Centrism of Russian culture: ways of perceptance and modification (2024)