Economic downturns fuel sad books, claims study; Authors tend to write books containing sad words around 10 years after an economic downturn, according to a new ‘literary misery index’
January 12, 2014 Leave a comment
Economic downturns fuel sad books, claims study
Authors tend to write books containing sad words around 10 years after an economic downturn, according to a new ‘literary misery index’
Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Hardy all wrote about the bleak side of life Photo: Rex Features/Getty Images
By Telegraph reporter
10:01PM GMT 08 Jan 2014
Authors tend to write more miserable books about 10 years after an economic downturn, a study has claimed. Researchers compared the number of times certain words appeared in more than five million books to certain periods in American and British history. They found that the frequency of words expressing sadness reflected the economic conditions in the 10 years before a book was written.The lead author of the study was Alex Bentley, Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. He said: “When we looked at millions of books published in English every year and looked for a specific category of words denoting unhappiness, we found that those words in aggregate averaged the authors’ economic experiences over the past decade.
“In other words, global economics is part of the shared emotional experience of the 20th century.”
The researchers counted how often certain “mood words” were used across time by searching more than five million books digitised by Google. The designated mood words were divided into six categories: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.
A “literary misery index” was then created by measuring the abundance of “sadness words” against the number of “happiness words”.
The researchers found that texts written during some periods contained more of these sadness words than others. These periods tended to occur around 10 years after an economic downturn, such as those that happened during the First World War (1918), the aftermath of the Great Depression (1935) and the energy crisis (1975).
In an attempt to verify their results, the researchers also analysed books written in German, where they found a similar pattern.
The study’s co-author Paul Ormerod, who is an economist, said: “The results suggest quite clearly that, contrary to post-modern literary theory, literature serves a purpose. It informs people about the human condition, and the content adapts to the conditions of the time.”
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