Third-person narration dominated novels for 250 years until first person surged after 1970

Evidence

A half-awake critic wandering bookstore aisles and contemplating prize winners may have noticed that this definitionality now falters: third person is shockingly scarce. My Brilliant Friend, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Sympathizer, Severance, The Goldfinch, An Untamed State, What Belongs to You, Prep, Conversations with Friends, 10:04, The Round House, Swing Time, How to Be Both, Me before You, Milkman, The Mars Room, Absurdistan, Lost Children Archive, The Friend, Ready Player One, The Vegetarian, Luster—the list of bestselling and beloved contemporary first-person fictions does not end. Quantitative proof isn’t the point of this argument, but when Underwood graciously fulfilled a request to run his code on an expanded data set counting the twentieth century and extending into the twenty-first, he found what we would expect: the consistent dominance of the third person holds across the twentieth century too—until its last quarter, when a 250-year trend ends. The definitive third person recedes, and the first person begins to markedly increase around 1970. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the rate of increase is precipitous. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 130

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ted Underwood’s computational literary history (Distant Horizons) and to Franco Moretti’s quantitative formalism — the method Kornbluh borrows.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing Underwood’s actual data and method — which corpus, how ‘third person’ is coded, and whether the 1970 turning point is robust across genre categories.