Article snippet: Two hundred years after her death, Jane Austen commands a cultural empire — fan fiction, adaptations, merchandise — with her six novels at the center. It raises the question: Why her, as opposed to someone else? Franco Moretti, founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, which applies data analysis to the study of fiction, argues that certain books survive through the choices of ordinary readers, a process something like evolution: “Literary history is shaped by the fact that readers select a literary work, keeping it alive across the generations, because they like some of its prominent traits.” What traits make Austen special, and can they be measured with data? Can literary genius be graphed? Her novels, reasonably successful in their day, were innovative, even revolutionary, in ways her contemporaries did not fully recognize. Some of the techniques she introduced — or used more effectively than anyone before — have been so incorporated into how we think about fiction that they seem to have always been there. One thing early readers did notice was naturalism. Austen’s novels, unlike those she grew up reading, owed nothing to improbabilities. No settings of spooky Italian castles (she mocks such Gothic devices in “Northanger Abbey”); no characters kidnapped by rakes or bequeathed a fortune with strange provisions attached. Walter Scott, a popular author of historical novels mostly forgotten today, praised her “art of copying from nature as she really exists in the com... Link to the full article to read more