Modeling Multilayered Complexity in Literary Texts

Abstract

We explore the relationship between stylistic and sentimental complexity in literary texts, analyzing how they interact and affect overall complexity. Using a dataset of over 9,000 English novels (19th-20th century), we find that complexity at the stylistic/syntactic and sentiment levels tend to show a linear association. Finally, using dedicated datasets, we show that both stylistic/syntactic features – particularly those relating to information density – as well as sentiment features are related to text difficulty rank as well as average processing time.