This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 15 May 2008, by Todd Suomela.
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15 May 08
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In a study to be published in the next issue of the journal Human Nature, my colleagues and I addressed this question by collecting and analyzing descriptions of physical attractiveness in thousands of folktales from all around the globe. What we found was that female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness. That six-to-one ratio held up in Western literature and also across scores of traditional societies. So literary scholars have been absolutely right about the intense stress on women's beauty in Western literature, but quite wrong to conclude that this beauty myth says something unique about Western culture. Its ultimate roots apparently lie not in the properties of any specific culture, but in something deeper in human nature.
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Another type of investigation exploits the massive processing power of computers to generate new information and ideas about literary history. Great gains have been made in recent years with stylometric studies, the computerized crunching of sentences that can establish an author's stylistic fingerprint. As Brian Vickers explains in his book, "Shakespeare, Co-Author," stylometry has helped settle long, angry debates about whether or not Shakespeare wrote some of his plays with coauthors (the answer is that he very probably did). Similarly, Colin Martindale's book "The Clockwork Muse" used computer algorithms and experimental simulations to challenge conventional views of how literary traditions change over time. Instead of changing quickly in response to large-scale sociopolitical shifts, as has frequently been argued, Martindale found that literary traditions actually change gradually and predictably. From this Martindale provocatively argues that the principal driver of artistic change is not social, political, or religious upheaval, but the steady pressure on individual artists to "make it new."
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