Quantitative methodological approaches to literature

Stylistics, understood as the study of the language of literary texts and a method for textual analysis, is a product of the twentieth-century formalists’ concern for the systematising of literary interpretation. However, since the institutionalisation of literature around the end of the nineteenth century, literary scholars have tended to keep borders between language and literature very clear-cut and have resisted methods that could bear resemblance to those used in natural sciences. Interest in quantitative approaches to stylistics has been on the rise since the advent of personal computers, mainly in the form of studies in which measurement and comparison of linguistic items can be checked electronically. Stylostatistics finds application in forensic authorship analysis, which looks for legal evidence for authorship attribution. Forensic stylometry has also been quite useful in detecting genuine confessions, in spotting plagiarism, and even authors of computer viruses.