Digital Space

doi:10.1017/9781009424264.023

Chapter 19 - Digital Space

from Part III - Applications and Extensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025

Peta Mitchell

Edited by

Elizabeth Evans

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Elizabeth Evans: Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit

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Summary

This chapter addresses the question of digital space in/and literary studies, exploring how literary fiction has been shaped by the digital and how it has, in turn, shaped conceptions of digital space. Across a period of roughly 35 years, the chapter traces changing understandings of digital space in and through the literary. Beginning with the emergence of cyberspace as a virtual, “placeless” space in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the concomitant but short-lived rise of hypertext theory, the chapter articulates how early formations of digital space were fundamentally bound up with questions of the literary. It then turns to more recent shifts in understanding the space of the digital as a more hybrid one that recognises social existence as being simultaneously, and co-constitutively, physical and virtual. To illustrate this more hybrid spatiality, the chapter draws focus to new dynamics of literary creation, distribution, and consumption as well as recent representations and remediations of this kind of hybrid spatiality in “internet” or “social media” novels that work to capture the compression of online and offline communicative social space.

Keywords

digital space literature cyberspace hypertext metaverse literary geography social media digital literary sphere

Type: Chapter
Information: Space and Literary Studies , pp. 319 - 335

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009424264.023 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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