Abstract

The novelist Charlotte Brontë grew up in a family of writers: Her brother Branwell, and her sisters Emily and Anne Brontë all had literary projects. It is well documented how the siblings imagined fantastic worlds and the adventures of their inhabitants together. These also wrote out these stories in microscript into tiny booklets. Especially Charlotte Brontë continued for a long time to write her early stories on the scale of the toy soldiers she and her siblings had been playing with. In this talk, I will show how the manuscripts of these “little books” were composed, how they lead to the playful configuration of a narrative, and how one can trace back elements of Brontë’s bestseller Jane Eyre to these early experiments in narrative and gameplay.

About the speaker

Karin Kukkonen, Professor, Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo

This seminar is co-hosted by Play Object Play (POP), Center for Language Generation and AI (CLAI) and the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC)

Free of charge - All are welcome