How are Literary Histories written? An LLM-based Analysis of Objects and Perspectives in German Literary History

This contribution presents a case study on the LLM-based analysis of literary histories. For analyzing how literary historiography – i.e., the writing of a literary history – works, we examine both the objects mentioned in literary histories and the so called analytical perspective on them. With an iteratively improved pipeline based on the analysis of propositions, we use an LLM to analyze three German literary histories. We find some frequent combinations of objects and perspectives as well as a potential relation of their prominence to the overall direction of the literary history in question. Moreover, our findings show that the approach is promising for a more comprehensive analysis of literary historiography – a central practice for Literary Studies that is debated a lot, but rarely described as a method.