Lower thematic concentration and diversified narratives: a comparative stylometric study of Southeast Asian Chinese new poetry versus Mainland Chinese counterparts
Yuxin Hao, Yongsheng Chen, X. Wang, Hui Wang · Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2026
Abstract Theme, as the core content of literary works, serves as a linguistic style marker, reflecting authorial characteristics. Thematic studies facilitate profound comprehension of literary texts. Thematic concentration, a quantitative linguistic measurement, indicates an author’s intentional emphasis on specific themes, while thematic diversity quantifies the lexical-semantic richness within literary expressions. As a significant branch of Sinophone diaspora literature, Southeast Asian Chinese-language literature constitutes modern Chinese “New Literature” with discernible Chinese cultural imprints. Scholarly investigations in this domain represent a crucial subset of Chinese literary studies. Current research exhibits a paucity of empirical comparative studies regarding stylometric similarities between Southeast Asian Chinese New Poetry and Mainland Chinese New Poetry. This study therefore employs computational stylometry through SPSS 27.0 and Python programming, implementing thematic concentration metrics for cross-regional poetic comparison. Through corpus-driven methodology, integrating high-frequency lexical analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, we quantitatively assess thematic configurations. Findings reveal: (1) significantly lower thematic concentration in Southeast Asian works versus Mainland counterparts, indicating a stronger monothematic tendency in Mainland poetry versus polythematic expressions in diaspora creations; (2) divergent thematic salience patterns—Mainland poetry emphasizes quotidian narratives, whereas Southeast Asian works prioritize natural imagery; (3) the inclusion of prose as control texts further elucidates genre-specific thematic distributions between poetic and prose forms.