Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Literary Data
- Chapter 2 Literary Change
- Chapter 3 The Canon
- Chapter 4 Voice and Performance
- Chapter 5 The Archive
- Chapter 6 Editions
- Chapter 7 Materiality
- Chapter 8 The Literary Marketplace
- Chapter 9 Fanfiction, Digital Platforms, and Social Reading
- Chapter 10 Narrative and Interactivity
- Chapter 11 Generated Literature
- Chapter 12 Literary Gaming
- Chapter 13 The Printed Book in the Digital Age
- Chapter 14 Literature’s Audioptic Platform
- Chapter 15 Critique
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To Literature
Chapter 13 - The Printed Book in the Digital Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: aN Invalid Date NaN
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Literary Data
- Chapter 2 Literary Change
- Chapter 3 The Canon
- Chapter 4 Voice and Performance
- Chapter 5 The Archive
- Chapter 6 Editions
- Chapter 7 Materiality
- Chapter 8 The Literary Marketplace
- Chapter 9 Fanfiction, Digital Platforms, and Social Reading
- Chapter 10 Narrative and Interactivity
- Chapter 11 Generated Literature
- Chapter 12 Literary Gaming
- Chapter 13 The Printed Book in the Digital Age
- Chapter 14 Literature’s Audioptic Platform
- Chapter 15 Critique
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To Literature
Summary
In this chapter, I show how the urge to monumentalize the book-bound novel in the face of cultural and technological transformations inspires a range of strategies to make literature anew. Starting from contested notions of the “end of the book” and then examining several “renaissances,” I explore the resilience of paper-based literature in the era of its foretold death. First, I examine how comparative literary studies has responded to the shift from analog to digital by developing new frameworks and critical tools. Then, I zoom in on recent innovations in, and reinventions of, analogue literary practices, in book art and book design as well as literary fiction. I end with a reflection on a specific form of bookishness that emphasizes the novel’s size and scale, and thus reinvents it as monumental. On all these levels, we will see, the digital has brought the book, and the novel as the literary art form bound by the book, into sharper focus.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age , pp. 233 - 249Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024