Canonical Status and Literary Influence: A Comparative Study of D anish Novels from the Modern Breakthrough (1870–1900) (2024)

Abstract: We examine the relationship between the canonization of Danish novels and their textual innovation and influence, taking the Danish Modern Breakthrough era (1870–1900) as a case study. We evaluate whether canonical novels introduced a significant textual novelty in their time, and explore their influence on the overall literary trend of the period. By analyzing the positions of canonical versus non-canonical novels in semantic space, we seek to better understand the link between a novel’s canonical status and its literary impact. Additionally, we examine the overall diversification of Modern Breakthrough novels during this significant period of rising literary readership. We find that canonical novels stand out from both the historical novel genre and non-canonical novels of the period. Our findings on diversification within and across groups indicate that the novels now regarded as canonical served as literary trendsetters of their time.

## introduction at the beginning of the 21 st century, the danish government published an educational canon (undervisningskanon) and a cultural canon (kulturkanon) in an attempt to improve knowledge of danish literature among the population, and to standardize school syllabi @xcite . both canons were met with criticism, and the canon debate flared up in full force -a development similar to, e.g., the netherlands and germany @xcite . much of the criticism in denmark was of the canon being unrepresentative and lacking diversity, including but one female author at the time @xcite . the danish canon debate echoes a central issue in literary scholarship, dating at least to the 'canon wars' of the 1980s @xcite : the critique that the canon is a top-down, contemporary construct that does not accurately reflect works' historical significance, their impact on readers, or the breadth of literary production of a period. still, advocates for the 'canon' being a meaningful term foot_0 argue that canonical works exhibit an enduring literary value and distinguish themselves by their lasting influence and innovation at the textual level @xcite . in this paper, we examine two hypotheses reflecting these polar stances on the canon: that canonical works are top-down and present day constructs, so that they would not stand out textually from their contemporaries (h1); and that canonical works distinguish themselves by textual novelty and literary influence, in which case we would expect them to show an impact on their literary field (h2). to gauge whether books that are (today) considered canonical exhibit these distinguishing traitstextual innovation and literary impact and whether this resonates in what was published after -we compare canonical novels to novels that did not make it into the different constructions of 'canon' in a case study of danish novels written in the modern breakthrough era. this late 19 th century period is particularly suited as a case study of canon/noncanon dynamics for three reasons: 1) it allows us to examine the status of canonical works within their historical context. 2) it allows us to work with a complete corpus of the literary production of a time period -albeit limited. this is particularly significant because attempts to address issues of canon representativity often face the challenge of not catching the 'dark numbers' of literary production -the extensive numbers of titles forgotten or overlooked (i.e., the 'great unread' @xcite ). lastly, 3) the modern breakthrough era is a period of significant political and cultural upheaval, where we would expect to see literary innovation. the modern breakthrough (1870-1900) -in danish, det moderne gennembrud -marked a significant shift towards realism and naturalism, diverging from the romantic and idealistic styles that characterized the preceding period (d' @xcite . spearheaded by the influential critic georg brandes, 2 this era brought as much cultural as social change @xcite . literature of the period was unprecedented in emphasizing social issues, individualism, and a scientific approach, advocating for art to reflect and critique society @xcite . moreover, the period saw a great rise in the number of literary publications @xcite , as well as an incline in previously underrepresented voices: journalists, teachers, and female authors published more @xcite . the current study focuses exclusively on modern breakthrough novels, which is not just a methodological choice to increase comparability, foot_2 but also recognises the novel's central position in the literary field of the late 19 th -20 th century. in this period, the novel expanded its reach to a broad and diverse readership, whereas poetry largely catered to a limited elite audience @xcite . this democratization of literature, coupled with the novel's generic capacity to reflect the complexities of a rapidly changing society foot_3 -social, political, and personal -renders it the period's most dynamic and malleable genre. it is a genre in which we expect much -even short-termdevelopment in this period. as both a popular and prestigious genre, the novel also reflects the evolving tensions between canonical authority and popular appeal, making it an unparalleled document for tracing literary influence and its directionality in the period. this paper is structured as following: section 2 contains a discussion of related work on canonicity, literary innovation and influence, and the danish literary context. in section 3, we describe the dataset and annotations. our methodological pipeline is described in section 4, and includes the creation of document embeddings using both a multilingual model and tf/idf, clustering methods for validating embeddings, and measuring diachronic change to explore how the canon and non-canon evolve over time. the results are presented in section 5, followed by a discussion in section 6. we finish with concluding remarks in section 7, and a discussion of the limitations of this study (section 8). ## data our dataset consists of a collection of 838 original danish and norwegian novels , with connected metadata, e.g., number of pages, book prizes, and publishing house. 8 previously, bjerring-hansen and rasmussen (2023) tagged the corpus for whether a work is a historical novel or not. the corpus consists of all original first-edition novels published by danish publishers in the period. 9 as we sought to examine the relationship be-tween today's canonized novels from the modern breakthrough and the overall production of the period, we added a tag that informs us about the canonicity of the work. to compare the canons defined by a government-designated committeewhich do not include norwegian authors -with a canon that we assume to be created from a literary expert point of view (and less driven by a political agenda), we create a second canon that includes novels that are listed and mentioned in the lemma 'det moderne gennembruds litteratur' of the encyclopedia den store danske. 10 we thus added the following tags to the novels in our corpus: statistics of the corpus and every category can be found in ## methods we developed a methodological pipeline consisting of the following steps: we are aware that the educational and cultural canon and the den store danske lemma include more genres than the novel. this paper focuses specifically on the canonical reputation of the novel. 11 note that some tags overlap, so that we tag as historical-canon in the following visualizations anything that was both tagged historical and was in either of the canons. 12 an extended dataset (with added tags) is available on huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ chcaa/memo-canonical-novels . ## discussion seeking to validate what our embeddings capture, we compared canonical and historical novels both in terms of embedding space and lexical similarity (tf/idf). the fact that these two groups of novels -canonical and historical -cluster differently at the level of embeddings is interesting for two reasons: firstly, it suggests a maintained coherence of the historical genre in this period, although it was in decline @xcite . secondly, since this is not an equal comparison -one group being a genre and the other a category spanning a diversity of novels -we find that the clustering must suggest that our embeddings capture more than thematic elements, which more usually distinguish more popular genres @xcite . moreover, our clustering experiments show that different constructions of the canon, i.e., the more political, smaller canon, and the expert canon which includes non-danish authors to a higher degree, do not seem to differ significantly: both versions include novels that stand out based on their semantic features. the textual features of the small selection of novels included in the cultural canon and the educational canon are not different from those of the novels that are included in what we call the lexical canon. this can be derived from the way in which novels from both groups have close proximity to each other and are mixed in the dendrograms (figs. 6a and 6b ). for our main result, we show that the modern breakthrough novels that have a canonical status today show traits at the textual level which suggest their innovation and distinction from their noncanonical contemporaries, contra to our h1. this ties in with what is shown in earlier studies on the literary canon: canonical novels have text-intrinsic features that distinguish them from other novels @xcite @xcite . moreover, our results suggest that canonical novels behaved innovatively, introducing characteristics in the modern breakthrough era, which resonated in the literary production that came after -non-canonical novels in a sense tracing after the canonical novels. in a diachronic comparison, we see that non-canonical novels adapt to the canon, likely copying the innovative themes and style that these trendsetters introduced. this supports our h2. it makes the current study -to the best of our knowledge -the first that uses embeddings to show the relationship between canonical and non-canonical novels in terms of innovation and influence. furthermore, the decreasing intra-group similarity of both the canon and non-canon reflects the diversification of the literary field during the period, as outlined by @xcite . a larger variation of novels saw the light of day, and a more diverse selection of novels became canonical, reflected in canonical novels' increasing internal diversity. while this study confirms the textual innovation of canonical novels, it is possible that there are novels that show the same textual profile as the canon but that did not get canonical status. future research should provide more insight into these potentially innovative but today lesser known novels. moreover, while we argue that the canonical status of novels might be related to their textual profile, we acknowledge that text-extrinsic features could also have played a role here. future work could, therefore, explore the relationship between the canonical status of a novel and features such as the price of the book, and the publishing house -something the current dataset allows for. a last note concerns the directionality of the canon and non-canon works, where our results suggest that works in the canon group may have acted as literary trendsetters. further research, employing more sophisticated methods to gauge causality is needed to confirm our suggestion. moreover, future work could compare the embedding spaces of canon and non-canon groups to the embedding space of non-fiction texts, as the latter may serve as a useful reference point for assessing the movement and direction of fiction works. ## conclusion we have examined the relationship between the canonization of danish novels and their textual innovation and influence, taking the danish modern breakthrough era as a case study. we created embeddings of the 838 novels in our corpus, and used a custom historic clustering task to decide on the best suited model for our task and corpus, which turned out to be the multilingual m-e5-large-instruct model. we validated our embeddings by creating a tf/idf representation of each novel. our results show that the embeddings capture semantic features and go beyond lexical features: historical novels and canonical novels cluster differently. inter-group similarity shows that the similarity of canonical and non-canonical novels increases over time, while at the same time, intra-group similarity decreases, indicating that the canon group as well as the overall novel production becomes more internally diverse over time. we finally show that the non-canon moves towards the canon, suggesting that non-canonical novels adapt to the canon, possibly copying the innovative themes and style of these trendsetters.