Au-delà de l’attribution d’auteur : la stylométrie permet-elle d’identifier l’« identité collective » des textes littéraires et le sexe des auteurs ? Analyse comparée de la fiction narrative d’Europe et d’Afrique
Beyond authorship attribution: Can stylometry reveal the collective identity of literary texts and the gender of their authors? A comparative study of narrative fiction from Europe and Africa

Summary/Abstract: This article reports a stylometric study of contemporary French prose from the second half of the 20th century by authors from Europe and Francophone Africa. We test whether classical stylometry, long effective in authorship attribution, can also capture collective properties of large corpora – specifically author gender and cultural origin. Results show that, in fiction, gender detection is highly unreliable: skilled writers can convincingly adopt diverse voices regardless of sociological profile, whereas the same methods often succeed on non-fiction by users (blogs, emails, social media). Likewise, in French prose, analyses based on short lists of neutral function words fail to discriminate European from African authors. Clear separation appears only when long n-gram features are used, which encode culturally inflected vocabulary and contexts. We discuss methodological implications for stylometry beyond attribution.

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