First-person narration dropped sharply after the early eighteenth century

Evidence

Computational analytics expert and Romanticist Ted Underwood has calculated the prevalence of the third person, showing how even as the total number of novels begins to skyrocket in the early eighteenth century, the number in the first person drops by more than 50 percent, from a majority to a margin. Then, this proportion of third-person prevalence holds extremely steady across the entire nineteenth century. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Data-backed textual shift — surfaces the same quantifiable formal-analysis approach the reader uses to find aesthetics features in real works.