Comparing literary worlds: An analysis of the spaces of fictional universes in the work of two US prose fiction debut cohorts, 1940 and 1955

This article presents a geometric data analysis (GDA) of the two “spaces of fictional universes” made up by the literary works of two cohorts of US prose fiction debut writers, 1940 and 1955. It is argued that the analysis reveals a common structure with significant variations that enable a comparison between two different states of a collective social imaginary, generated by 385 of the 560 authors included in the study. It is shown that the 1955 space is characterized by a greater contrast between agonistic and non-agonistic universes, and a firmer gendering of these oppositions. Other results include a confirmation of the generally accepted intuition that first novelists tend to reproduce features of their own social and geographical background in their works, but it is argued that different “site effects” enable a greater power to appropriate symbolically privileged spaces. The article concludes with a brief return to the individual authors, indicating the kind of research that the geometric data analysis makes possible.