Acknowledgements

It has been a most enriching and gratifying experience to work on Transformative Reading, written over the course of a few years but showcasing work over the past fifteen. The sections on Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta (Office of Interdisciplinary Studies), the University of Oslo (Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages), and Utrecht University (Department of Languages, Literature and Communication), as well as the Huygens Institute (Computational Literary Studies Research Group, KNAW) have provided fruitful and solid grounds for the development of this work.

The manuscript is inspired by my PhD dissertation on self-modifying reading (2012, University of Alberta), supervised by David Miall and Don Kuiken. I am grateful to David Miall (in memoriam) and Don Kuiken for their paradigm shifting scholarship, which has mainly inspired this work. I thank David Miall for his supervision and mentorship throughout the years. My gratitude also goes to Sylvia Chard for her friendship and most inspiring conversations on education and to Cathelein Aaftink for her friendship and conversations on literature, phenomenology and life. Margaret Mackey, and Marisa Bortolussi have also been influential during this phase of my work. A special word of thanks goes to Sonia Zyngier for having read the whole PhD dissertation and for sharing her thoughts with me, which resulted in the creation of Lex-Nap. Thus, I could not have chosen another series to give home to this manuscript.

The series of empirical studies that helped give shape to this manuscript and the awareness of the need to publish it were inspired by work conducted together with an interdisciplinary team of scholars in the project ‘Uses of Literary Narrative Fiction in Social Contexts’. Special thanks go to Marloes Schrijvers, Tanja Janssen, and Gert Rijlaarsdam for their challenges and insights on how to make complex philosophical and literary concepts meaningful and applicable to secondary education teachers and students. This collaborative work enabled the first application of the transformative reading model in a social context. The cognitive underpinnings of this work have been most carefully sharpened and updated under the auspices of the Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE) research group, led by Karin Kukkonen. I am grateful to ILOS and LCE for the opportunities to teach aspects of this work to Psychology and Comparative Literature students at the University of Oslo and for important dissemination of this work in Norway and Europe.

Several colleagues have taken the time to read my drafts. I am indebted to Karin Kukkonen for having read the whole manuscript. Her critical insights were valuable for improving its quality. I thank my research assistant Guro Kjenner Brånå for her work on Chapter 1 and all LCE colleagues for the thought-provoking and amiable scholarly discussions on individual chapters, especially Rolf Reber, Natalia Igl, Beate Seibt, Alexandra Effe, Stijn Vervaet, and Ilva Østby. Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Barbara Dancygier, Merja Polvinen, and Siri Hustvedt have also discussed individual chapters with me. I would like to thank them for their enthusiasm and support for this project. I hope I have done them justice. At John Benjamins, I am grateful to the Linguistic Approaches to Literature series editors Joanna Gavins and Sonia Zyngier for their careful work. I am also grateful to Peter Stockwell for his thorough and insightful editorial work on the whole manuscript. I thank him for sharing his knowledge and words of enthusiasm for this project with me. John Benjamins could not have gifted me with a better editor, which I thank deeply. I also thank Ymke Verploegen for her work.

This project would not have been viable without the generous funding throughout the years, which I am grateful for. The research described in Chapters 1 through 8 and 10 was supported by the FS Chia Scholarship (2005–2007), the Graduate Student Award J. Gordin (2008), the Graduate Scholarship Mary Shore (2008), the Graduate Prize Andrew Stewart Memorial (2010), all by FGSR, University of Alberta. The research described in Sections 9.1 and 9.2 was part of the project ‘Uses of Literary Narrative Fiction in Social Contexts’, supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO; Grant number 360 30 240, 2014–2018). Rewriting these chapters was funded by LCE, University of Oslo (2019–2020). The research in Section 9.3 is part of the current ERC-Advanced project ‘MORE: Moral residue – epistemological ramifications, ethical implications, and didactic opportunities’ (2021–2026), supported by the European Commission (Grant number 883642).