Why the Daisy Sisters are different A stylometric study on the oeuvre of Swedish author Henning Mankell and the Dutch translations of his work

In this paper, 32 books by the Swedish writer Henning Mankell were investigated using stylometric methods, to find out whether his style varies indifferent genres, if his style changed measurably over time, or if his books differ from each other stylistically for other reasons. The results show that the time of publication can play a role, but that other factors, such as dominant verb tense used and narrative perspective, as well as register, are more important in determining whether and how the style of novels differs. This study also gives more insight into frequently used methods in stylometry, such as cluster analysis and PCA, that give little information about the stylistic features that differ between texts. For this purpose, the original Swedish texts were also compared to the Dutch translations of the same texts to determine how translation and language influence the results of stylometric analyses.