Graphomania?

In his valuable book Literary Theory for Robots (W. W. Norton, 2024) Dennis Yi Tenen suggests that authorial productivity has shot up over the past two centuries. This chimes in with Thad McIlroy’s suggestion that there are already so many books available, that the addition of a bunch written by AI can’t really be said to dilute the market in any way that anyone’d notice. (Indeed it was Mr McIlroy who steered me towards Literary Theory for Robots in the first place.) Professor Tenen writes: “Authors prolific by eighteenth century standards wrote on the order of a dozen or so major works” though he does allow “You can probably find an outlying graphomaniac or two somewhere in addition”. His data set: Defoe: 8 novels, 16 works of nonfiction Jonathan Swift: fifteen books Goethe: 6 novels and “many theater plays” Jane Austen: 9 novels Laurence Sterne: under 10 Sir Walter Scott: 7 novels . . . . . Then as evidence of nineteenth-century productivity increase we are given Dickens: wordy…