Ebook: Media Ecologies of Literature

This book explores the media ecologies of literature – the ways in which a literary text is interwoven in its material, technical, performative, praxeological, affective, and discursive network and which determine how it is experienced and interpreted. Through novel approaches to the complex, contingent, and interdependent environments of literature, this volume demonstrates how questions about the mediality of literature – particularly in the wake of digitization – shed a new light on our understanding of textuality, reading, platforms, and reception. By drawing on recent developments in advanced media theory, the essays in this volume emphasize the productivity of innovative re-conceptualizations of literature as a medium in its own right. In an intentionally wide historical scope, the essays engage with literary texts from the late Victorian to the contemporary, from Virginia Woolf to A. L. Kennedy and Mark Z. Danielewski, from the traditionally printed novel to audiobooks and reading apps.