Creative Transformation in Literary Texts: Modelling Change Across Representational Levels

Abstract:Creativity is often framed as the production of novelty, yet many cultural works emerge through transformation of earlier artifacts and not through isolated invention. Drawing on theories of imitation by Gabriel Tarde and James Mark Baldwin, this paper models creativity as selective transformation across multiple levels of textual representation. We introduce a multi-level framework that compares literary texts across lexical, semantic, conceptual, structural, and narrative dimensions using directional alignment and control calibrated similarity measures. Applying the model to historically documented literary relationships, we show that different pairs preserve source structure at different representational levels while diverging in others. These transformation profiles provide a quantitative method for characterizing how imitation persists and where creative divergence occurs within literary works.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2607.28513 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.28513v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.28513 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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