A stylometric analysis on authorship attribution of Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World

Abstract The Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World ( MBAW ) is an outstanding “novel about human relationships” that emerged in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, holding an unshakable position in the history of Chinese novels. However, up to the present, the issue of its authorship has remained unresolved. The mainstream view in current academia is divided between two possibilities: the eminent literary figure and novelist Pu Songling from the Qing dynasty, and the novelist Ding Yaokang from the late Ming and early Qing periods. For the first time, this study employs stylometric methods to compare the Most Frequent Characters (MFCs) and lexical features of MBAW with similar works by Pu Songling and Ding Yaokang, subjecting them to Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The results indicate that there is a high probability that neither Pu Songling nor Ding Yaokang is the author of MBAW . The conclusion of this study challenges the prevailing view in academia to a certain extent.