About the project
In the project JEUX we show how seventeenth-century novelists used play practices to negotiate the multiple possible paths of development open to the genre at this point in its history. We analyse the seventeenth-century novel through play in order to change our understanding of a decisive period in the most popular narrative genre today.
Insights gained from the analysis of fictional worlds, formal coherence and narrators contribute to current questions in literary theory from post-critique to new formalism and narrative studies.
Purpose
Through the investigation of the neglected corpus of literary games from seventeenth-century France, JEUX will tell a new history of the novel.
JEUX draws on methods from literary studies, anthropology and game studies.
A series of creative-writing workshops will try out literary games not played in centuries and pioneer a practice-based approach to the literary archive.
