Why Novels (Don’t) Break Through: Dynamics of Canonicity in the D anish Modern Breakthrough (1870-1900) (2025)

Abstract: Recent studies suggest that canonical works possess unique textual profiles, often tied to innovation and higher cognitive demands. However, recent work on Danish 19th century literary novels has shown that some non-canonical works shared similar textual qualities with canonical works, underscoring the role of text-extrinsic factors in shaping canonicity. The present study examines the same corpus (more than 800 Danish novels from the Modern Breakthrough era (1870–1900)) to explore socio-economic and institutional factors, as well as demographic features, specifically, book prices, publishers, and the author’s nationality – in determining canonical status. We combine expert-based and national definitions of canon to set up a classification experiment to test the predictive power of these external features, and to understand how they relate to that of text-intrinsic features. We show that the canonization process is influenced by external factors – such as publisher and nationality – but that text-intrinsic features nevertheless maintain predictive power in a dynamic interplay of text and context.

## introduction why do some novels have an enduring status in literary cultures while others remain outside the canon? the question of how novels achieve -or fail to achieve -canonical status has long fascinated literary scholars, generating a rich field of study. recent work suggests that the textual features of literary works hold significant predictive power in determining their canonicity. compared to noncanonical works, canonical works exhibit a unique textual profile @xcite @xcite , with stylistic characteristics connected to a higher cognitive load on the reader @xcite @xcite . moreover, recent studies have gone beyond stylistic analysis to examine representations of canonical novels in semantic space. for example, @xcite , working with a corpus of historical french fiction, demonstrated that canonical works are often more deeply integrated into an intertextual network after publication. similarly, in @xcite we examined textual embeddings of late 19 th -century danish novels, revealing that canonical novels distinguish themselves through innovation and impact. these novels not only stand out from their contemporaries but also appear to be literary trendsetters of their time. although previous studies have reaffirmed the role of textual features in determining a novel's canonicity, they do not fully explain the phenomenon. either the features selected for analysis or the definition of the "canon" appear to create blind spots. for instance, in @xcite we identified a category of novels with textual profiles similar to canonical works, which, however, remain lesser known today. this suggests that textual qualities alone may not be sufficient to explain canonicity. the inability of these "non-canonical canonicals" (i.e., novels with textual profiles similar to canonical works) to achieve widespread recognition implies that other factorsbeyond the textual features -play a crucial role in shaping canonicity. previous research has emphasized the importance of text-extrinsic factors such as the spread of novels, their accessibility to readers, and the socio-economic conditions surrounding their production @xcite . these aspects may influence canonization processes, where evaluation plays a role at every level, from publisher to reviewer and reader @xcite and where institutions also create and maintain the canon @xcite . such factors may be key to understanding why some works with seemingly "canonical" characteristics fail to enter the canon. thus, the case of @xcite 's noncanonical novels raises an important question: are models which focus primarily on text-intrinsic features overlooking key factors related to a novel's dissemination and reception? to answer this question, we investigate the broader socio-economic and institutional contexts of literary production, focusing on text-extrinsic factors -specifically, book prices, publishing houses, and the author's nationality -as predictors for a novel's canonicity. we test the strength of text-extrinsic features for determining the canonical status of a novel in a classification task. we compare this to the performance of exclusively text-intrinsic features as used in @xcite , as well as the combination of text-extrinsic features and text-intrinsic features. we propose two hypotheses: h1: novels that achieve canonical status are more strongly associated with a combination of text-intrinsic and text-extrinsic features (than with, e.g., text-intrinsic features alone). h2: novels that achieve canonical status are more strongly associated with either text-intrinsic or text-extrinsic features (such that the addition of, e.g., text-extrinsic features does not significantly improve the prediction of canonicity). our classification task with different textintrinsic and text-extrinsic settings will give us an idea of how these factors interact in literary canon formation. moreover, we inspect models based on all possible feature combinations individually and analyse misclassifications in depth to gauge what they can tell us about the boundaries of the literary canon. for this study, we use the same corpus of novels from the modern breakthrough (det moderne gennembrud, 1870-1900) as we did in @xcite , to examine them in a controlled context. this period is ideal for our study because it offers exhaustive coverage of literary production within a short timeframe, situating the novels within a small, relatively contained literary field (the danish). this approach is significant because previous efforts to examine canonicity often struggle to account for the "dark numbers" of literary production -i.e., the forgotten or "great unread" works @xcite . by focusing on a small, restricted, yet exhaustive setting, we can directly compare canonical novels to the contemporary production, avoiding the potential biases introduced by spuriously selected control groups. this paper is structured as follows: section 2 reviews related work on text-intrinsic and textextrinsic features of canonical works, as well as the literary context of our corpus. section 3 provides an overview of the corpus used in this study and explains how the canonicity of a novel was defined. section 4 details our methodological pipeline, covering the creation of document representations, selection of text-extrinsic features, preparation of classification tasks, execution of experiments, and analysis of false positives. section 5 presents the results, beginning with descriptive statistics, followed by the classification outcomes and an indepth analysis of false positives. this is followed by a discussion in section 6, and concluding remarks in section 7. ## data our dataset comprises 838 original danish and norwegian novels published between 1870 and 1900, accompanied by metadata such as page count, (original) book price and publishing house. all novels, including those by norwegian authors, were published in danish and by danish publishers. the corpus includes all first-edition novels from danish publishers during this period, excluding non-novel works like short story collections. 4 we use the categorization of novels' canonical status in @xcite . 5 their list of ## methods to test our hypotheses, we take the following approach in this paper: 1. creating document representations. to build a compact representation of the texts, we use a large language model to create a semantic embedding of each novel -the m-e5-large-instruct model. 8 previous work has tested this model against three other sota models for danish in creating embeddings that would perform well generally and across historical danish documents for this particular corpus @xcite ). 9 each 6 see https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/det_ moderne_gennembruds_litteratur . note that while government canons and den store danske index various genres,this paper focuses solely on novels. 7 an extended dataset with additional tags is available on https://huggingface.co/datasets/chcaa/ memo-canonical-novels . ## discussion the results of our classification tasks show that both the text-intrinsic features and (a subset of) the text-extrinsic features provide predictive value of canonicity. in our experiments based on the full corpus, the text-extrinsic features outperform the embeddings. this confirms h2. however, when we only look at the performances of the experiments based on the subset of large publishing houses, textintrinsic features outperform text-extrinsic features, which confirms our h2 in the opposite direction. a combination of both embeddings and nationality, or all features together, result in similar performances. this does not provide strong support for h1, but since a combination of features does not lower the predictive performance either, it is neither a rejection of this hypothesis. additional experiments are required to be able to either confirm or reject h1. in sum, the misclassification of novels, as discussed in the previous section, suggests that textual similarity to canonical works alone is not sufficient for inclusion in the canon: the lack of editorial support or limited distribution due to price choices might impact their status since their first publication. the presence of false positives having the 'right profile' in terms of price, editor and nationality, on the other hand, might indicate two different phenomena: (i) there are other text-extrinsic features that impact their canonical status, such as institutional support, inclusion in specific literary trends, and so forth; (ii) there are some essential text-intrinsic features, not captured by textual embeddings, that could explain their exclusion from the canonical group. whether muusmann and the other mentioned authors were excluded from our canonical lists for the first or the second order of reasons is probably a question for a next study. there are several directions in which future research could develop. firstly, the definition of canonicity could be refined, for example by using alternative lists, and by replacing categorical labels with a more continuous metric that better accounts for degrees of recognition. expanding the range of text-extrinsic features could improve our understanding of how text and context interact with each other in the process of canonization. additionally, a more detailed analysis of false positivesincluding their commercial success and literary afterlife -would help contextualize these works. one approach to this would be to do a text re-use study and investigate which novels are more often discussed in public debate -either cited in newspapers or mentioned in the works of influential critics such as georg brandes and søren kierkegaard. moreover, it would be equally worthwhile to investigate the false negatives -canonical novels that were not classified as such based on their embeddings. such an analysis could enhance our understanding of factors such as the role of publishers in the canonization process. finally, further exploration is needed to understand why certain publishers are so closely linked to canon formation and how their role has evolved over time. in terms of the methods we used, improving our sampling techniques (both through downsampling and upsampling) and refining our approach to text embeddings could enhance our results. rather than averaging vectors, alternative approaches could be explored to experiment with different aggregation strategies. further research is still needed to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what embeddings capture -and what they overlook. this could involve not only comparing embeddings with other textual features, such as syntactic complexity, cognitive processing difficulty, and stylistic patterns, but also employing these features as standalone text-intrinsic measures. future work could also explore experiments with generalized additive models (gams) to analyze potential non-linear relationships between features and classification outcomes, providing a more flexible yet interpretable alternative to linear models. additionally, simpler and more interpretable methods, such as tf-idf, could serve both as points of comparison and as alternative ways to analyze textual characteristics. 12 ## conclusion this paper has examined the roles of text-extrinsic and text-intrinsic features in shaping a novel's canonicity, using the danish modern breakthrough era (1870-1900) as a case study. we employed embeddings generated with the multilingual m-e5-large-instruct model as text-intrinsic features, while our text-extrinsic features included the novel's price, publisher, and the author's nationality. using a random forest classification model, we predicted whether a novel belonged to the canon or other category based on various feature sets. our findings demonstrate that text-extrinsic features are strong predictors of a novel's canonicity, suggest-ing that external dynamics play a significant role in canon formation. at the same time, embeddings alone emerged as robust predictors for canonicity, both on their own and when combined with textextrinsic features. importantly, we show that these results are not disproportionately influenced by the many small publishing houses that each published a single non-canonical novel. we also explored what misclassifications reveal about the boundaries of the literary canon. by focusing on non-canonical novels with textual profiles similar to canonical works, we investigated why these novels failed to achieve canonical status. our analysis seems to show that, for many authors, text-intrinsic characteristics were insufficient to secure a place in the canon. conversely, we demonstrated that some novels exhibiting the correct textual profile, publisher, and price still failed to achieve canonical recognition.