Novels Favor Politics Over Culture

Using three LLMs to read 240 canonical novels, Hanson finds that when novels show characters taking or changing stances about social movements, those movements are overwhelmingly political rather than merely cultural, and character changes are predominantly attributed to encountering surprising facts or events. The cross‑model counts and median percentages (e.g., median political share ≈80–85%, cause = 'seeing unexpected events' in the majority of cases) provide an empirical signal—albeit model‑dependent—about the political orientation of high‑status literary fiction. — If novels disproportionately encode political change and factual shock as the mechanism of belief revision, that matters for how literature contributes to public persuasion and civic learning; it also illustrates how AI can quickly surface cultural patterns, with implications for media framing and humanities scholarship.