Rural versus urban fiction in contemporary Chinese literature - Quantitative approach case study

The study examined contemporary Chinese novels that depicted the social changes in rural and urban areas. We analyzed the texts using several quantitative methods of stylometry (lexical richness, activity, descriptivity, nominality, cluster analysis of the most frequent words) and corpus linguistics (keywords). We focused on the differences (both in style and in content) between contemporary fiction depicting life in Chinese rural and urban areas. The results revealed that rural stories are more dynamic (active), focusing more on the plot with a simpler description and a smaller vocabulary.