This chapter examines the British essay in the age of the Internet, a period which has radically reshaped literary culture. Online magazines and journals now outnumber their print precursors, vastly increasing the venues available to budding essayists. But this transformation was predated by a more pivotal online trend: blogging. Beginning in the early years of the new millennium, and ending, effectively, with the rise of social media, the golden age of blogging allowed a wave of self-published writers to revolutionise literary criticism and cultural theory. Free from professional aims and ambitions, experimental and avidly personal, their essays left a lasting impression on both literary journalism and the academy. This chapter explores the underacknowledged possibilities and legacies of blogging, surveying the ways in which prominent bloggers reimagined the essay form.

This chapter contextualizes the career of the maverick, proletarian, Chinese American writer H. T. Tsiang – both the contrarian, “floating” sensibility that led him to self-publish his work in the 1930s and 1940s, challenging the China-watching mainstream which constellated around the bestselling author Pearl Buck, as well as the renewed interest in his work decades later, when it was recast as performing a kind of avant-garde negation. Tsiang’s career offers a model for thinking about rivalry and failure, the latter-day romance of lost causes, as well as the lineages drawn upon to sustain the aspirational scope of Asian American studies.

This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which the boom of digital technologies has affected the novel. The Internet and especially social media are now recurrent themes in print fiction, which also often reflect the changes in our experience of space and time through new structures and styles. Beyond such thematic manifestations, however, the novel has seen more fundamental innovations that stretch its traditional boundaries. We can discern three main areas of evolution. First, the emergence of new modes of publication, including digital publishing, self-publishing, and writing platforms such as Wattpad have democratized the access to audiences and incited amateurs to write fiction. Secondly, the new modes of communication facilitate the exchange between authors and readers, while also bringing about the rise of the ‘influencers’, who are taking over the role of trend-setting from professional critics. Lastly, new modes of storytelling have emerged that rely on digital networks: interactive fictions that break up the linearity of the text and give agency to the reader, and blogs, websites, and social media experiments that play with temporality, form, and modes of interaction with the audiences.