The Riddle

This chapter introduces the project The Riddle of Literary Quality in which computational text analysis methods were applied to help understand what makes contemporary novels literary or not in the eyes of their readers. The chapter concisely describes the institutional approach of Bourdieu’s sociology of art, the new sociology of art in which the artwork itself is placed back into the picture, and neo-Darwinian thoughts about art. Next follows a short overview of the affordances of computational literary studies and of the empirical study of literature. All disciplines together form the background against which The Riddle of Literary Quality took a totally new, combined approach to research into literary value attribution.