Varieties of Digital Literary Studies

Digital literary studies constitutes a broad church. However, the field tends to divide into, at one pole, quantitative, macro-level studies of historical literary texts and, at the other pole, close-readings of individual born-digital literary works, typically hyper-avant-garde in conception. There is, in practice, little interplay between the two groupings. This article sketches a proposed meso space in between the two extant levels. Drawing on methods from book history, literary sociology, cultural studies, and digital media theory, this mid-level approach examines digital technology’s role in recasting the institutions of contemporary mainstream literature: the impact of powerful new digital intermediaries; the blurring of author/reader/reviewer roles; and the continued existence of print artefacts within online environments

Digital media · Extant taxon · Literary criticism · Mainstream · Digital Games and Media · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Publishing and Scholarly Communication