Videogames once seemed like they would have a part to play in the future of the book – the natural evolution of literary practice onto more expressly interactive digital platforms. Today, despite numerous compelling examples of videogames that support literary engagement, the comparison can seem strange, clichéd, banal, and beside the point. This chapter attempts to reset the comparison of videogames and literature for the present moment of digital culture. First, it presents a brief history of critical perspectives on videogames as literature. Second, it reflects on the contemporary status of and challenges to videogaming’s literary aspirations following recent shifts in the industry’s design priorities and monetization practices. This chapter does not present an argument regarding the status of games as literature. Rather, its goal is to describe the urgent work of literary studies in continuing to rethink digital gaming in the unfolding digital age.

Chapter 9 focuses on paratext from the eighteenth century to Victorian novels, highlighting the revival of omniscience in twenty-first-century storytelling before taking a technological leap to hypertext. Building on theories put forward by specialists of the field, it shows to what extent the notion of ‘interactivity’ and the reader’s higher implication in the creative process in digital fiction as opposed to print fiction need to be narratologically and pragmatically qualified. As the reader is strongly invited to (virtually) perform the action mentioned in the hyperlink by clicking on it if the story is to go on at all, the reference model (of Chapter 1) is tested and adapted to foreground the limits but also the potentialities of digital art. In response to Warhol’s distinction (1986, 1989, 1995) between ‘engaging’ and ‘distancing’ narrators, Chapter 9 also proposes a new model of implication in fiction, taking the perspective of actual readers. Given their degree of engagement and immersion in the narrative addressed to ‘you’, distinctions between ‘engaged’, ‘distanced’ and ‘immersed’ readers are suggested in a flexible model allowing for intermediate positioning.

The material properties of platform and medium figure prominently in Scott Rettberg’s examination of digital fiction as literary engagements with computer code, video gaming, hypertext, audio and visual plug-ins, and virtual reality. Narratives with multiple or interactive pathways, role-playing and perspectival shifts, and mass authorship reconceptualize postmodern and contemporary literary themes and techniques within digital textualities.

This chapter engages with the Internet as a discursive realm where the profound conflicts generated by settler-colonialism continue to be played out. In the dynamic space of the Internet, Indigenous digital storying is a claim to rhetorical sovereignty that articulates Native self-determination through specific ways of knowing and being. A powerful statement of Indigenous self-determination is the use of mobile locative media – “Mapping Indigenous LA” (Gabrielino/Tongva and Tataviam), Knowing the Land beneath Our Feet (Musqueam), and Finding Sacred Ground (Lakota) – to create a digital remapping of Native geography, denaturalizing settler cartographies and restoring Native storying to the land, while two dominant “digital Native” forms of storying that use the capabilities of virtual media in conjunction with traditional literary genres to instantiate Indigenous cosmologies are the digital film-poems or “poemeos” exemplified by Heid Erdrich’s Anishinaabe storying, aas well as Elizabeth LaPensée’s Anishinaabe/Métis storying through Indigenously-determined digital narrative or videogames.

Focuses on terms and methods. Discusses the oral-performative textual culture of Second Temple Judaism and how that impacts our understanding of rewriting. Reviews earlier terminology for rewriting and then introduces the book’s terminology for talking about rewriting according to two main subtypes, revision and reuse. Discusses a variety of methodological issues pertaining to how rewriting is identified and how to distinguish between revision and reuse.

As the impact of the internet has rippled in ever larger circles over the past twenty-seven years, Pound’s presence on the web has slowly made itself felt: as web aggregators starting anthologizing poetry, selections from his work, particularly the shorter poems, were showcased on websites like Poetry Foundation, Bartleby.com or Poetry Archive. Universities, in their turn, began hosting modernist literature projects, such as PennSound in Philadelphia, where parts of Pound’s work are presented and commented on next to that of other modernist writers. Online libraries or book clubs hold scanned versions of the New Directions edition of The Cantos in closed access. Commentators publish their own work with extensive quotations in blogs or digital magazines, and artists upload artwork inspired by Pound and his poem. Wikipedia now boasts a long article on Pound himself, one on The Cantos and one on a ‘List of Cultural References in The Cantos’.