队列继承解释了文学文化的大多数变化

行为的许多方面都是由曾经形成的相对耐用的处置指导的。例如，政治观点和语音学在很大程度上通过队列继承发生了变化。但是，在艺术和智力史上稀缺了队列效应的证据。这些领域的研究人员更常见地将变化解释为对最近的创新和事件的直接回应。We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication. Writing practices do change across an author’s career. But the pace of change declines steeply with age. This finding suggests that existing histories of literary culture have a large blind spot: the early experiences that form cohorts are pivotal but leave few traces in the historical record.

这项工作已在创意共享归因4.0国际许可证。