  In this article we propose a stylistic analysis of texts written across two
different periods, which differ not only temporally, but politically and
culturally: communism and democracy in Romania. We aim to analyze the stylistic
variation between texts written during these two periods, and determine at what
levels the variation is more apparent (if any): at the stylistic level, at the
topic level etc. We take a look at the stylistic profile of these texts
comparatively, by performing clustering and classification experiments on the
texts, using traditional authorship attribution methods and features. To
confirm the stylistic variation is indeed an effect of the change in political
and cultural environment, and not merely reflective of a natural change in the
author's style with time, we look at various stylistic metrics over time and
show that the change in style between the two periods is statistically
significant. We also perform an analysis of the variation in topic between the
two epochs, to compare with the variation at the style level. These analyses
show that texts from the two periods can indeed be distinguished, both from the
point of view of style and from that of semantic content (topic).

Computation and Language