Examining Ethical Universalism in Contemporary World Literature Through Cross-Cultural Narrative Analysis

Abstract

This article aims to empirically examine the concept of ethical universalism in contemporary world literature through a statistically rigorous cross-cultural narrative analysis. The structured multilingual corpus was analyzed using standardized moral vocabularies, semantic embedding techniques, and proba- bilistic topic modeling to quantify ethical constructs in cross- cultural contexts. Descriptive statistics, effect size calculation using Cohen’s d, Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients, and multivariate regression analyses were used to examine cross- cultural thematic convergence. Principal component analysis and exploratory factor analysis were utilized to derive latent moral constructs, whereas hierarchical cluster analysis and silhouette validation were used to examine cross-cultural differentiation. Bootstrapped confidence intervals and permutation tests ensured statistical reliability at an alpha level of 0.05. The results show strong cross-cultural thematic convergence in essential ethical constructs with strong intertextual correlation coefficients (r ¿ 0.65, p ¡ 0.01). However, moderated regression results show narrative modulation effects in cross-cultural contexts. This article statistically validates the concept of ethical universalism in cross-cultural contexts, providing a quantitatively validated methodological framework for cross-cultural ethics in literature..