The anglophone novel has historically favored third person over first

Evidence

The paramount exemplar of this hegemony is a dramatic change in the novel. For most of its 300-year existence, third person has been the norm for the anglophone novel. Now, a serious formal mutation is underway, with first person becoming the dominant. Very early English novelists like Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson often used first-person narration, though they did so with editorial prefaces and frame narratives, and with a formal importance of Bildung or long temporal arcs that differentiated the narrating self from the character self—all aspects that cast a lot of static in the way of writing as self-effusion. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 127

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth checking: is the third-person-to-first-person shift claim actually supported by Underwood’s data running to the present?