Towards literary narrative perspective. The relationship between narrative perspective and perceived literariness

Abstract

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between the narrative perspective of Dutch works of bestselling fiction and the perceived literariness of those novels. Combining literary-sociological and computational methods, I take an interdisciplinary approach to identify what literary narrative perspective looks like in the eye of the early 21st century Dutch reader. This research is partially methodological in nature because it builds upon the operationalisation of narrative perspective as the ratio of first person pronouns in a text. I have found no direct effect of narrative perspective on perceived literariness. Rather, I make the case that the perceived literariness of narrative perspective is influenced by the sociologically structured places where the reader expects to encounter it. However, based on a broad overview of the Dutch literary market, I do argue for some text-intrinsic properties of literary narrative perspective, as some kinds of narrative perspective are more concentrated within certain contexts such as genre and translation.