Influence of classic literature on the downslope.

Folks from a mathematics department, of all people, came to this conclusion. And it's all James Joyce and Virginia Woolf's fault.

A professor in the Dartmouth College math department performed a study examining trends in literature, using 7,733 works from 537 authors since the year 1550 to specifically look for the frequency of "content-free" words like of, at, by, etc.*

Apparently, since the modernist movement occurred at the hands of writers like Joyce and Woolf nearly a hundred years ago (when writers started deliberately shunning literary convention), writers have shunned the influence of writers from the previous four centuries--and at a quickening rate as well. Writers now tend to be influenced by their peers and their peers alone.

Good thing, too. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: we all know that Shakespeare fella was a hack.



*I don't know what that has anything to do with it. Just go with it.