The Bloomsbury Handbook Of Electronic Literature

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2018 The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the most authoritative available handbook to the field. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for students of contemporary culture in the digital era.

Winner of the 2017 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2018 The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of theory in the 21st century. With chapters written by the world's leading scholars in their field, this book explores the latest thinking in traditional schools such as feminist, Marxist, historicist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial criticism and new areas of research in ecocriticism, biopolitics, affect studies, posthumanism, materialism, and many other fields. In addition, the book includes a substantial A-to-Z compendium of key words and important thinkers in contemporary theory, making this an essential resource for scholars of literary and cultural theory at all levels.

"Bringing together 150 seminal articles from leading scholars, writers and digital artists, Post-Digital charts the history of critical debates on the impact of the digital on art and scholarship today. Collecting over 20 years of major interventions from the pioneering journal electronic book review, this 2-volume set also includes new responses chronicling more recent developments in the field since the original articles, a substantial introduction surveying the long history of thinking about the digital and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading"--

Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth. The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does “worlding” bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain? With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.

"Bringing together 150 seminal articles from leading scholars, writers and digital artists, Post-Digital charts the history of critical debates on the impact of the digital on art and scholarship today. Collecting over 20 years of major interventions from the pioneering journal electronic book review, this 2-volume set also includes new responses chronicling more recent developments in the field since the original articles, a substantial introduction surveying the long history of thinking about the digital and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading"--

Electronic Literature considers new forms and genres of writing that exploit the capabilities of computers and networks – literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context. In this book, Rettberg places the most significant genres of electronic literature in historical, technological, and cultural contexts. These include combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction (and other game-based digital literary work), kinetic and interactive poetry, and networked writing based on our collective experience of the Internet. He argues that electronic literature demands to be read both through the lens of experimental literary practices dating back to the early twentieth century and through the specificities of the technology and software used to produce the work. Considering electronic literature as a subject in totality, this book provides a vital introduction to a dynamic field that both reacts to avant-garde literary and art traditions and generates new forms of narrative and poetic work particular to the twenty-first century. It is essential reading for students and researchers in disciplines including literary studies, media and communications, art, and creative writing.

This Element examines a watershed moment in the recent history of digital publishing through a case study of the pre-web, serious hypertext periodical, the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994-1995). Early hypertext writing relied on standalone, mainframe computers and specialized authoring software. With the Web launching as a mass distribution platform, EQRH faced a fast-evolving technological landscape, paired with an emergent gift and open access economy. Its non-linear writing experiments afford key insights into historical, medium-specific authoring practices. Access constraints have left EQRH under-researched and threatened by obsolescence. To address this challenge, this study offers platform-specific analyses of all the EQRH's cross-media materials, including works that have hitherto escaped scholarly attention. It deploys a form of conceptually oral ethno-historiography: the lore of electronic literature. The Element deepens our understanding of the North American publishing industry's history and contributes to the overdue preservation of early digital writing.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Collecting and recontextualizing writings from the last twenty years of John Cayley's research-based practice of electronic literature, Grammalepsy introduces a theory of aesthetic linguistic practice developed specifically for the making and critical appreciation of language art in digital media. As he examines the cultural shift away from traditional print literature and the changes in our culture of reading, Cayley coins the term “grammalepsy” to inform those processes by which we make, understand, and appreciate language. Framing his previous writings within the overall context of this theory, Cayley eschews the tendency of literary critics and writers to reduce aesthetic linguistic making-even when it has multimedia affordances-to “writing.” Instead, Cayley argues that electronic literature and digital language art allow aesthetic language makers to embrace a compositional practice inextricably involved with digital media, which cannot be reduced to print-dependent textuality.