Apples and Oranges? Large-Scale Thematic Comparisons of Contemporary Swedish Popular and Literary Fiction

• Karl Berglund, Department of Literature, Uppsala UniversityMats Dahllöf, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala UniversityJerry Määttä, Department of Literature, Uppsala UniversityApples and Oranges? Large-Scale Thematic Comparisons of Contemporary Swedish Popular and Literary FictionThe aim of this article is to compare thematic trends in contemporary Swedish bestselling and literary fiction with the help of a computational method—topic modelling—which extracts content themes based on statistical patterns of word usage. This procedure allows us to identify trends and patterns that are not easily discovered through manual reading. We track topics in two subsets of Swedish fiction from the period 2004–2017: 1) prose fiction on the Swedish bestseller charts, and 2) prose fiction shortlisted for the August Prize (arguably the most prestigious Swedish literary prize). The results confirm several assumptions about contemporary popular and literary fiction, such as more plot-focused themes in popular fiction and themes more connected to settings in literary fiction. But the outcomes also provide new, and more surprising knowledge, such as food and economy being the most biased themes among the non-crime fiction bestsellers, whereas themes concerning nature are most biased in the literary realm. Moreover, themes relating to sex, intimacy, and violence are biased towards literary fiction rather than popular fiction. In the light of our findings, we argue that both popular fiction and literary fiction seem to be characterised by certain thematic attributes that make it relevant to discuss them as genres also on a textual-thematic level.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Bestsellers

The August Prize

Swedish literary fiction

distant reading

topic modelling

popular fiction

Literature

Litteraturvetenskap

Computational Linguistics

Datorlingvistik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)