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Don't gloat about reading Ulysses: all books follow the same six storylines, researchers find
There may once have been cachet in ploughing one's way through Ulysses, War and Peace or Kafka's Metamorphosis.
But according to one study, there is no greater cause to boast about reading James Joyce than EL James.
All novels contain one of just six possible plots, with similar emotional arcs running though every work from the highbrow to the bodice-ripper, according to researchers.
They include the classic 'rags to riches' storyline, as detailed in Oliver Twist, the 'riches to rags' such as King Lear, and 'man in a hole' such as Moby Dick where a protagonist finds himself in a difficult spot before navigating out of it.
The 'Icarus' plotline sees characters rise before a spectacular fall, 'Cinderella' shows the character's fortunes rise, fall, then rise again and 'Oedipus' when the character falls, rises and then falls.
The University of Vermont study was inspired Slaughterhouse 5 author Kurt Vonnegut who originally proposed the similarity of emotional story lines in a Masters's thesis rejected by the University of Chicago.
Dr Andrew Reagan, statistician, said: "Stories help us encode and understand our collective existence, underpin cultures, and help frame the possible.
"Describing the ecology of all human stories is an essential scientific enterprise.
"With the advent of the internet and massive digitisation this vital work has become, in part, a data-driven one.
"There are many aspects of stories to characterise and here we take on just one: The overall emotional trajectory.
"In a lecture recorded in 1985, Kurt Vonnegut introduced the idea of quantifying the emotional arcs of stories.
"He suggested that 'Man-in-a-hole' is a primary kind of shape in the dimension of good-ill fortune. 'Somebody gets into trouble gets out of it again. People LOVE that story!'
"Vonnegut pointed out that computers would be perfectly suited to the task of finding good-ill fortune trajectories, and with this inspiration and today's computing power, we tested his instincts on a large supply of books.
"We extracted and analyzed the emotional arcs of 1,722 novels from the Project Gutenberg corpus using sentiment analysis, and found six common shapes."
The study say scientists use big data and natural language processing to analyse the books' narrative by deconstructing and distilling its plot lines.
Dr Reagan said: "There were only six main emotional storylines.
"These include 'rags to riches' (sentiment rises), 'riches to rags' (fall), 'man in a hole' (fall-rise), 'icarus' (rise-fall), 'Cinderella' (rise-fall-rise), 'Oedipus' (fall-rise-fall).
"This approach could, in turn, be used to create compelling stories by gaining a better understanding of what has previously made for great storylines.
"It could also help teach common sense to artificial intelligence systems.
"Our work on emotional arcs is just one part of understanding the ecology of stories.
"There is much more to do: Extracting and comparing plots, character paths, comparing across cultures and time periods. But all this now seems possible."
The study was published in EPJ Data Science.