What makes some novels literary? There is little agreement within literary studies on this question. The two main approaches focus either on text-intrinsic factors (e.g., aesthetic, stylistic), or text-extrinsic social factors (e.g., author prestige, critics). Until now, there has not been a comprehensive study taking both text-intrinsic and social factors into account. The project The Riddle of Literary Quality examines both factors by connecting literary texts to the appreciation of those texts: can we identify textual characteristics that are connected to readers’ literary appraisal of texts? In this paper, we describe the development of The National Reader Survey and present some results. The National Reader Survey is a large online survey of Dutch readers with about 14,000 respondents; its purpose is to collect readers’ literary appraisal of texts. We asked readers to rate both read and unread novels on a scale of 1–7 for their literary and overall quality. The agreement amongst respondents on which recent Dutch language novels are of high literary quality and which are not was greater than expected. Motivations respondents gave for their ratings show that the notion of literary quality is a familiar one and respondents most commonly relate it to two elements: the first is the text itself—style, structure, plot and layers; and the second is genre—if a novel is considered a ‘genre’ novel (e.g., suspense, romantic, fantasy), its chances of obtaining a high rating on literary quality are small. These results indicate how entwined social and text-intrinsic factors are. We also touch upon project results which make use of the survey data.

是什么使某些小说成为文学？文学研究在这个问题上几乎没有共识。两种主要方法要么集中于文本固有的因素（例如，美学，风格），要么集中于文本外部的社会因素（例如，作者的声望，评论家）。到目前为止，还没有一项综合研究将文本内在因素和社会因素都考虑在内。“文学质量之谜”项目通过将文学文本与对这些文本的欣赏联系起来来检验这两个因素：我们能否确定与读者对文学文本的评价相关的文本特征？在本文中，我们描述了《全国读者调查》的发展并提出了一些结果。全国读者调查是对荷兰读者的大型在线调查，有大约14,000名受访者；其目的是收集读者对文本的文学评价。我们要求读者以其文学和整体素质对阅读和未读小说进行1-7评分。受访者之间的共识是，近期荷兰语小说具有较高的文学素养，但并未超出预期。受访者给予评级的动机表明，文学质量的概念是一个熟悉的概念，受访者最常将其与两个元素相关联：第一个是文本本身—样式，结构，情节和层次。第二种是体裁-如果一本小说被认为是“体裁”小说（例如悬疑，浪漫，幻想），那么获得较高文学水准的机会就很小。这些结果表明社交和文本内在因素是如何交织在一起的。我们还将利用调查数据来探讨项目结果。