We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
It has long been argued that digital textuality fundamentally alters familiar conceptions of literary authorship. Critics such as Jay David Bolter, George Landow, and Mark Poster have articulated a conception whereby the interactive affordances of digital textuality level the playing field between author and reader. Rather than consuming the text passively, readers become “coauthors,” actively creating a unique narrative through their interactions and narrative choices. While these bold prophesies may not have materialized, digital textuality has worked to challenge the model of individual authorship. This chapter looks at two contemporary practices that serve to promote and “normalize” group authorship: fanfiction and social reading. It provides a literary history of collective authorship and analyzes the pressure that fan sites like FanFiction.net and An Archive of Our Own are putting on our conventional means of evaluating literary excellence, notably by challenging conceptions of originality and distinctiveness. It also considers how another facet of digital reading – social reading, as practiced on sites like Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter – is creating new feedback loops between authors and readers, facilitating the development of new “interpretive communities,” and working to undermine the centrality of the solitary genius and the solitary reader to literary production and reception.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.