“Jane Austen’s famous prose may not be hers after all!” declares the headline of this week’s Telegraph. But the truth is kinder than the fiction: as Prof Kathryn Sutherland explains, Austen’s finished style may owe as much to the machinations of a kindly editor as to her own inventions. Sutherland stakes her claim on careful comparison between Austen’s [...]

Tell me a story and I’ll tell you who you are is the oracular title of an article published in August’s edition of the Journal of Research in Personality. The German research team found that when readers were asked to judge the personalities of the writers of several short essays, they were surprisingly accurate on three [...]

In a sad bit of news, scientists have found that for great novelists, the ravages of old-age and dementia may manifest in deteriorating verbal dexterity. While previous research by James Pennebaker and his collaborators has shown that writers’ word use and style remains relatively consistent over the years, this is not the case for writers in the [...]

Is literature a means of cultural transmission? Stanford Professor Jeanne Tsai has reason to think so. In past research, Tsai and collaborators have found significant differences in how adults from Western and East Asian cultures understand and express emotion. Now, tracing the causal chain back, she’s found that children’s literature may play an important role [...]