Media Ecologies of Literature

Description

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 processes. By drawing on recent developments in advanced media theory, Media Ecologies of Literature emphasizes 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 Romantic to the contemporary period, from Charlotte Smith and Oscar Wilde to A. L. Kennedy and Mark Z. Danielewski, from the traditionally printed novel to audiobooks and reading apps.

Susanne Bayerlipp teaches English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her research focuses on the relation between material culture, literature, and affect theory. She is currently working on a book project on compulsive hoarding in contemporary literature and culture. In 2018, she co-edited a special issue of the peer-reviewed ZAA on Cultural Techniques of Literature. Ralf Haekel is Professor and Chair of English Literature at Leipzig University, Germany. His main research interests lie in the fields of Romanticism and Media Studies. His publications include The Soul in British Romanticism (2014), the Handbook of British Romanticism (De Gruyter, 2017), and British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century (2019). Johannes Schlegel teaches English Literature and Cultural Studies at JMU Wurzburg, Germany. His PhD thesis on the anthropology and mediality of evil in British Romanticism was awarded the international Novalis Prize in 2016. In 2018, he co-edited a special issue of the peer-reviewed ZAA on Cultural Techniques of Literature.

This is an impressive, highly nuanced and above all very helpful collection at the cutting edge of a slightly disoriented discipline in need of guidance. It addresses three related questions that are normally kept at a distance: How are scholars of literature to react to the changing media infrastructure in which texts are produced and circulated, which of the many media theories at our disposal are best suited for the task, and to what extent are these issues already at play in the texts themselves? Media Ecologies of Literature does what good collections are supposed to do--it provides surveys and samples, informed overviews, and revealing case studies. And it comes with an optimistic undertone: 'media' are not a threat to literature, they are a foundation and an opportunity. * Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Professor of German and Nordic Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada * As one of its key departure points, Media Ecologies of Literature powerfully rejects recent critical and theoretical portrayals of Kittlerian media theory as putatively 'technodeterminist.' In doing so, this transformative edited collection squarely places media materialities and affordances back into conversations with textual, semiotic, and sociocultural concerns that, as this volume's authors persuasively reveal, have always already been productively conjoined as complex media ecologies. This book will be an important resource for media studies scholars and critics seeking to explore the inherent knottiness-natural and cultural, semiotic and material, subjective and objective-of myriad cultural mediations issuing from Friedrich Kittler's 'Discourse Network 1800' to our present. * Andrew Burkett, Associate Professor of English, Union College, USA, and author of Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (2016) * What can a book do? What can literature or files? Here are 219 pages of precise, imaginative and probing forays into this surprisingly demanding question. * Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *