The reorganization of cultural schemas in the American literary field, 1861–1899

• In Event: 40258 - Culture II: On Novelty and Transformation

Abstract

How did the first American field of mass media respond to, reinforce, and transform sociocultural distinctions in the wake of industrialization? Recent cultural sociology has demonstrated how cognitive schemas organize subjective evaluations of cultural objects, primarily through elicitation exercises linking sociodemographic identities to perceptual schemas. While illuminating how individuals decode perceptions, these cross-sectional studies offer limited insight into the long-durée, field-level processes that encode forms with potential meanings across different segments of the population.

This study analyzes a dataset of 400,000 American imprints to demonstrate how the literary field systematically differentiated its products through stratified production conventions—utilizing distinct combinations of binding materials, price structures, and narrative elements—that corresponded to emergent low, middle, and high-brow market segments during America's industrial transformation. Through analyzing social actors populating fictional universes across cultural strata, I examine how the field produced "folk-sociological" character schemas with distinct configurations of race, class, gender, and occupational identities tailored to different socioeconomic audiences.

Methodologically, I employ an LLM pipeline to extract sociodemographic identities and attributed characteristics of fictional characters—including descriptors of physical appearance, personality traits, moral qualities, and behavioral tendencies. I identify stereotypical clusters of co-occurring traits that coalesce into recognizable character types across different segments of the literary marketplace. Extracting relations among fictional characters and their settings reveals how fictional social types become organized into larger simulated social structures that narratively encode characters with further potential meanings.

The findings reveal that as economic differentiation intensified during the Gilded Age, character schemas in middle-class literary works functioned as symbolic boundary mechanisms that morally distanced readers from working-class identities while fostering identification with bourgeois dispositions. More broadly, I advance sociological understandings of the role of cultural fields in reshaping cultural schemas during times of radical social upheaval.

Author

• Jack LaViolette, Columbia University