Literature in the Digital Age

Literature in a Digital Age: An Introduction guides readers through the most salient theoretical, interpretive, and creative possibilities opened up by the shift to digital literary forms such as e-books, digital archives, and electronic literature. While Digital Humanities (DH) has been hailed as the 'next big thing' in literary studies, many students and scholars remain perplexed as to what a DH approach to literature entails, and skeptical observers continue to see literature and the digital world as fundamentally incompatible. In its argument that digital and traditional scholarship should be placed in dialogue with each other, this book contextualizes the advent of the digital in literary theory, explores the new questions readers can ask of texts when they become digitized, and investigates the challenges that fresh forms of born-digital fiction pose to existing models of literary analysis.

• An accessible, readable overview of the critical and creative possibilities that exist at the intersection of literature and digital technology
• Offers easy-to-follow introductions to cutting-edge text analysis tools and digital editions
• Provides close readings of key texts in electronic genres including Flash Poetry, Webcomics, Interactive Fiction, Hypertext, Alt Lit, and indie videogames