Features of Timelessness: Intermediate Report on a Quest for Stylistic Features that Mark Literary Canonicity.

We report on our ongoing quest to establish a validated complex of stylistic features that act as markers for literary canonicity, in specific contexts. Currentely we present a stylometric analysis of literature investigating the stylistic markers that differentiate former bestsellers from fiction that remains popular across several decades using a TfIdf vectorization of texts and UMAP dimenision reduction approach. We find that especially a greater variation in sentence length is associated with the chances of a novel to remain popular.