Good Reads and Easy Novels: Readability and Literary Quality in a Corpus of US-published Fiction

Yuri Bizzoni, Pascale Feldkamp Moreira, Nicole Dwenger, Ida Marie S. Lassen, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Kristoffer L. Nielbo

Keywords: Readability, literary quality, literary fiction, digital humanities, stylometrics

TL;DR: We examine the relation of readability to the perceived quality of literary texts, using different standards of quality.

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the extent to which readability contributes to the perception of literary quality as defined by two categories of variables: expert-based (e.g., Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award) and crowd-based (e.g., GoodReads, WorldCat). Based on a large corpus of modern and contemporary fiction in English, we examine the correlation of a text's readability with its perceived literary quality, also assessing readability measures against simpler stylometric features. Our results show that readability generally correlates with popularity as measured through open platforms such as GoodReads and WorldCat but has an inverse relation with three prestigious literary awards. This points to a distinction between crowd- and expert-based judgments of literary style, as well as to a discrimination between fame and appreciation in the reception of a book.