The Word Choices That Explain Why Jane Austen Endures - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/upshot/the-word-choices-that-explain-why-jane-austen-endures.html
Two hundred years after her death, Jane Austen commands a cultural empire — fan fiction, adaptations, merchandise — with her six novels at the center. It raises the question: Why her, as opposed to someone else?
Franco Moretti, founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, which applies data analysis to the study of fiction, argues that certain books survive through the choices of ordinary readers, a process something like evolution: “Literary history is shaped by the fact that readers select a literary work, keeping it alive across the generations, because they like some of its prominent traits.”