Our warmest congratulations to our advisory board member Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo), who has received an ERC Consolidator Grant for the research project JEUX – Literary Games, Poetics and the Early-Modern Novel . The project offers a valuable continuation of Karin’s previous work on the early modern novel by investigating how literary games in the French seventeenth-century salons contributed to establishing the novel as a genre. The project will combine a more traditional literary approach with anthropology and creative writing and, among other things, make students engage in some of these 400 years-old games. Anyone interested in not only the early history of the novel, but also narrative processes at large, are advised to keep an eye on this fascinating project.

We take this opportunity to recommend two of Karin’s recent books: 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet (2019) and (co-authored with Marco Caracciolo) With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition (2021). Both are must-reads for anyone interested in cognitive narratology and literature.

You can read an interview with Karin Kukkonen and Gry Oftedal here (in Norwegian).