ABSTRACT
Literary novels written by male authors received higher scores for literary quality than those by female authors. This chapter focuses on the literary novels written by men, both translations and Dutch originals. Cluster analysis using Burrows’ Delta, principal components analysis (PCA), and keyword analysis are applied to explore differences in word usage and word frequencies between highly rated and lowly rated novels to search for an explanation of the ratings. The translation of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which received the highest mean score for literary quality, gets special attention. Dutch novels analysed in more detail are by Mart Smeets, Herman Koch, Kluun, and Arnon Grunberg, whose novels linguistically were close to Romance novels but received much higher ratings.
