Digital Literature and Critical Theory

This book investigates popular cultural phenomena and digital media which permeates our everyday lives rather than avant-garde niche productions, making the analysis accessible and relevant for a broader audience while taking its subject matter seriously in an academic study.This book neither takes a pessimistic stance towards technology, nor delivers uncritical praise of the new, but rather offers a nuanced, careful examination of various phenomena in a larger social context, using points of friction to generate new insights.Where other works often examine digital forms of isolation, this book builds its argument across a variety of digital forms, from social media posts to video games, allowing for overarching conclusions regarding ongoing social developments.In building a bridge between contemporary digital literature and non-digital forms and theory, this book addresses traditional literary scholars who might be unfamiliar with the digital material and those researchers with specialised knowledge of electronic literature alike.By foregrounding continuities and historical developments, this book supplements existing scholarship on digital literature with a perspective that has been underrepresented so far, adding another piece to the mosaic of potential approaches to digital literature.In a time when the humanities are being progressively marginalised and deprioritised, this book makes an argument for the particular relevance of both the methods of literary and cultural analysis, and the importance of emphasising the human element in an increasingly technologised world.