'The Order in the Horse's Heart': A Case Study in LLM-Assisted Stylometry for the Discovery of Biblical Allusion in Modern Literary Fiction
We present a dual-track pipeline for detecting biblical allusions in literary fiction and apply it to the novels of Cormac McCarthy. A bottom-up embedding track uses inverse document frequency to identify rare vocabulary shared with the King James Bible, embeds occurrences in their local context for sense disambiguation, and passes candidate passage pairs through cascaded LLM review. A top-down register track asks an LLM to read McCarthy's prose undirected to any specific biblical passage for comparison, catching allusions not distinguished by word or phrase rarity. Both tracks are cross-validated by a long-context model that holds entire novels alongside the KJV in a single pass, and eve...
| Authors | Ewan Cameron |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 21 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 April 2026 |
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