Connecting the Dots. Variables of Literary History and Emotions in German-language Poetry

In this study, we attempt new steps towards quantitative literary history, aiming to identify factors relevant to literary history and to model assumptions about the relationships between them. We use a case study of German-language poetry in the transition from realism to early modernism to approach our methodological goal. Using a Bayesian hierarchical generalised linear model, we focus on one aspect relevant to the history of poetry: The emotions represented in the poems, and also include period, author profession, author gender, rhyme, and verse length in the model. We can confirm the important role of thematic genres and find unexpectedly high values for rhyme and author’s profession. We also discuss some of the methodological of our attempt to model this tangled web of variables.