Novel Perceptions

Towards an inclusive canon

Our international team of academics is working with BBC Arts and a host of other project partners including the British Library and Libraries Connected on an ambitious new engagement project to mark the 300th anniversary of the English Language novel.  Starting in January 2020, The Novels That Shaped Our World is a year-long project that asks the public in Great Britain and beyond to debate a selection of 100 novels that have impacted upon the nation since Robinson Crusoe, 300 years ago. The project is accompanied by a nationwide Festival, programmes on BBC TV and Radio and a collaboration with libraries and reading groups throughout the UK. 

Led by the University of Wolverhampton, our team provides quantitative and qualitative analysis of the public’s reading preferences and judgement of literary quality.  The research project is entitled Novel Perspectives: Towards an inclusive canon (NOPE). Sebastian Groes, Professor of English Literature in the School of Humanities at Wolverhampton and Professor of Computational Humanities, Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens Institute, Netherlands) will lead a team of computational linguistics and English literature scholars to analyse the public’s engagement with these 100 novels. 

Our researchers will ask questions about generating a diverse, and socially inclusive canon fit for the twenty-first century, whilst stimulating literacy and readings cultures across the UK, and beyond. Most importantly, we want to know what novels shaped the lives of the British public.  We will be using the nQuire platform (https://nquire.org.uk) to launch a series of surveys.  nQuire was used to solicit data for the BBC’s massively successful Gardenwatch programme.  Project partners include Libraries Connected and The British Library.

The research has various strands.  Firstly, the team will help the BBC gather data on the way in which general public engages with the monthly group of ten novels that are released in categories including ‘Identity’, ‘Love Sex and Romance’ and ‘Rule Breakers’.  We would like to know which novels the public has read, and what they think about these works of fiction. Towards the end of the project, a longer survey will be released to understand how the general audience responded to the entire, year-long project.

Secondly, the “2020 Reader Review” research is a continuation of Professor Karina van Dalen-Oskam’s research into the ways in which readers were asked to assign ‘literary quality’ to contemporary novels.  This project is called ‘The Riddle of Literary Quality’, which shows that . This research is designed to understand how unconscious biases – the stereotypes that certain groups may have about individuals or other groups of people that we are not aware of – are part of our reading pattern, publishing industry, school curricula etc. 

Thirdly, our “Novel Memories” research wants to understand how people have remembered stories and characters they read in the past. We want to understand how people’s mood at a specific point in time when reading fiction has shaped their emotional understanding of the story, but we also want to know how people associate certain emotions with characters and books. We’re also interested in understanding what particular novels had a major impact on your life, and why? We will then ask you to reread these novels to see how your opinion of these novels has changed. For more information, contact Prof. Groes.

The research has various strands.  Firstly, the team will help the BBC gather data on how the general public engages with the monthly group of ten novels that are released in categories including ‘Identity’, ‘Love Sex and Romance’ and ‘Rule Breakers’.  We would like to know which novels the public has read, and what they think about these works of fiction. Towards the end of the project, a longer survey will be released to understand how the general audience responded to the entire, year-long project.

Secondly, the “2020 Reader Review” research is based on Professor Karina van Dalen-Oskam’s research into the ways in which readers were asked to assign ‘literary quality’ to contemporary novels.  This research is designed to understand how unconscious biases – the stereotypes that certain groups may have about individuals or other groups of people that we are not aware of – are part of our reading pattern, publishing industry, school curricula etc. 

Thirdly, our “Novel Memories” research wants to understand how people have remembered stories and characters they read in the past. We want to understand how people’s mood at a specific point in time when reading fiction has shaped their emotional understanding of the story, but we also want to know how people associate certain emotions with characters and books. We’re also interested in understanding what particular novels had a major impact on your life, and why? We will then ask you to reread these novels to see how your opinion of these novels has changed. For more information, contact Prof. Groes.

Project Team: 

Professor Sebastian Groes is NOPE’s Principal Investigator.  Bas is Professor of English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton and Director of the Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research

Professor Karina van Dalen-Oskam is Co-Investigator of NOPE. Karina is Head of Department of Literary Studies at the Huygens Institute, the Netherlands and Principal Investigator of ‘The Riddle of Literary Quality’. 

Dr Laurie Hanquinet is Co-investigator of NOPE. Laurie is Professor in Computational Sociology at Université Libre Bruxelles. 

Dr Tom Mercer is is Co-investigator of NOPE.  Tom is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Wolverhampton

Dr Aidan Byrne is is Co-investigator of NOPE.  Aidan is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton. 

Peter Harvey is our  BBC liaison and helps us design our nQuire surveys. 

Dr Nick Lavery is Web Administrator of The Memory Network   

Project Partners

BBC Arts. BBC is organiser of The Novels That Shaped Our World, a year-long project that asks the public in Great Britain and beyond to debate a selection of 100 novels that have impacted upon the nation since Robinson Crusoe. The 100 novels were chosen by a panel consisting of journalist and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup; bestselling author, screenwriter and columnist Juno Dawson; writer Kit de Waal; journalist, BBC Radio 4 Front Row presenter and editor of The Times Literary Supplement Stig Abell; and author Alexander McCall Smith

The centrepiece of the season will be the three-part BBC Two series, The Novels That Shaped Our World. The series will examine the novel from three unique perspectives: Empire and slavery, women’s voices and working class experiences

The 100 novels are presented in ten themed categories, explored on the BBC site here.

The other partners on this project are:

British Library 

Libraries Connected

The Reading Agency

The Open University

Huygens Institute, the Netherlands

BBC Novel Recommendations Panel

Nicola Allen (Wolverhampton, UK)

Antonia Beck (Independent, UK)

Daisy Black (Wolverhampton, UK)

Peter Childs (Newman, UK)

Rudolph Glitz (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Bas Groes (Wolverhampton, UK)

Ruzy Hashim (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

Nicole King (Goldsmith’s, UK)

Sarah Mears (Libraries Connected, UK)

Emma Parker (Leicester, UK)

Jackie Pieterick (Wolverhampton, UK)

Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway, UK)

Laura Salisbury (Essex, UK)

Ana-Karina Schneider (Sibiu, Romania)

Catherine Spooner (Lancaster, UK)

Jason Tougaw (City University, New York, USA)

Peter van der Zwaag (Bezige Bij publisher, Netherlands)

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