Novelists of the early-modern period were often also members of literary salons and practiced the literary games that served as entertainments in the salon assemblies: improvising a sonnet line by line as a group, painting a portrait with words, or compiling a shared story from an imagined sequence of letters. In her talk, Kukkonen argues that these games were more than just entertainments. They provided a key technology for the developing genre of the novel in the sense that they enabled novelists to model the creative process of compositing a novel. This argument for games as a technology draws on work in extended and embodied cognition (Hutchins 1998; Noë 2017; Cave 2015; Kukkonen 2019), suggesting that literary practices work as technologies of for the human imagination.
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