Economic Transformation and Cultural Change: Evidence from Two Centuries of French Drama
How do large-scale economic transformations shape cultural production? We address this question by combining computational linguistics, econometrics, and formal modelling, using French drama as a well-documented empirical laboratory. Applying latent Dirichlet allocation to a corpus of 1,215 theatrical texts published between 1700 and 1900, we show that aristocratic discourse centred on sovereignty and political authority was gradually displaced by bourgeois and household economic themes as French capitalism developed. Bayesian vector autoregressive models with max-share shock identification suggest a temporal shift in the literary response to economic shocks: bourgeois everyday-life theme...
| Authors | T. D. Oliveira, L. A. Attilio, M. J. Davila-Fernandez |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 June 2026 |
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