Karin Kukkonen, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Oslo

Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She is a specialist in cognitive approaches to literature and narratology. She has published on comics and graphic novels (Contemporary Comics Storytelling, 2013), embodied and probabilistic cognitive approaches to literary narrative, as well as on the eighteenth-century novel. From 2010-2013, she was a Balzan Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St John's College, University of Oxford.

"Karin Kukkonen's important book proposes several innovative theses. It argues that European neoclassicist literary theory was an early incarnation of present-day cognitive poetics, that the rules governing a given literary genre during a definite historical period, in this case seventeenthand eighteenth-century neoclassicist poetics of drama, were equally applied to other genres, and that, consequently, the eighteenth-century English literary wave called "the rise of the novel" was deeply indebted to the neoclassicist views on literature ... To conclude, Kukkonen's book represents the promising debut of a very talented young scholar and will certainly enjoy the success it deserves." - Thomas Pavel, Modern Philology

"The book radiates from a vigorous hypothesis, that of a kinship between eighteenth-century neoclassical poetics and present-day cognitive poetics. Karin Kukkonen, whose solid background in contemporary literary theory and textual criticism is indisputable, substantiates her persuasive argument with a wealth of case studies from eighteenth-century English and French novels. The bringing together of neoclassical poetics, the emergent novel and modern cognitive poetics proves to be a winning strategy for extending our knowledge of eighteenth century literature and culture." - Rosamaria Loretelli, Università di Napoli Federico II, Vice-President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

"The author terms her synthesis of neoclassical criticism and brain-body science a "cognitive poetics", but this is too modest; it is also a literary history, a theory of reception, and a demonstration of how heuristics such as situational logic, comeuppance clockworks, and Bayesian cognition can benefit literaty studies. Highlights include chapters on cheater detection in Richarson's Clarissa, cognitive estrangement in Utopian fiction, and free indirect perception in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. This is a meticulously edited, generously documented, and profoundly erudite book." - P.D. Collington, Niagara University, CHOICE