The AILC-ICLA Annual Lecture 2025: Perceptions of literariness across borders

On 20 November 2025, 13:00–14:30 UTC, we are delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens Institute KNAW and University of Amsterdam), who will open our new series of ICLA Annual Lectures with a talk entitled Perceptions of Literariness Across Borders.

In this talk, Prof. van Dalen-Oskam will present insights from two groundbreaking projects: The Riddle of Literary Quality (2012–2020, Netherlands) and its successor Novel Perceptions: Towards an Inclusive Canon (2020–2022, United Kingdom). Both projects carried out extensive reader surveys, asking participants to evaluate 400 contemporary novels, and combined these findings with large-scale stylometric analysis. This unique approach opens up new perspectives on the sociological and linguistic dimensions of literary evaluation: Do lowly rated novels share distinctive stylistic features? How do genre, gender, and translation shape perceptions?

Prof. van Dalen-Oskam is head of the Computational Literary Studies research group at the Huygens Institute (KNAW) and holds a special chair in Computational Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research bridges quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore the stylistic features of contemporary novels.

We warmly invite all interested to join this lecture for a fascinating exploration of how readers, cultures, and languages shape the boundaries of literature.

Abstract

In this talk, two projects will be discussed: the Dutch project The Riddle of Literary Quality (2012-2020) and its follow-up project in the United Kingdom, Novel Perceptions: Towards an Inclusive Canon (2020-2022). Both projects ran roughly the same large reader survey, asking respondents to rate a list of 400 recent novels for their general quality and their literary quality. Furthermore, both projects correlated the results of the survey with a stylometric analysis of the books that respondents rated. The result was an innovative exploration of both sociological elements of readers’ perceptions of literary quality and of the linguistic make-up of the rated books. Do lowly rated novels share certain linguistic features that set them apart from highly rated novels? What role do genre and gender play? Do the perceptions in the Netherlands in 2013, when the survey ran there, align with those in the United Kingdom in 2022? Special attention will be paid to the role of translations.

Bio

Prof. Dr. Karina van Dalen-Oskam leads the Computational Literary Studies research group at Huygens Institute (KNAW) and is professor by special appointment in Computational Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. In her research she combines quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of the writing style of contemporary novels.

Chairs

Yina Cao (Sichuan University) and Fotis Jannidis (University of Würzburg)

Respondent: Massimo Salgaro (University of Verona)

Marko Juvan (University of Ljubljana), Introductory remarks

Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens Institute KNAW and University of Amsterdam), Perceptions of Literariness Across Borders

If you would like to attend the conference, please register here : https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/the-ailc-icla-annual-lecture-2025-tickets-1837895437729