Between Novel and Network: Technology and Literary Form in Fiction and Fanfiction

The internet has enabled new forms of literature and challenged older forms to reinvent themselves. Between Novel and Network selects texts that exemplify these digital transformations, arguing that networked communication technologies have fundamentally altered the form and content of contemporary literature. The book begins by exploring digital fanfiction as a site of literary resistance and a form of literature that can only exist in the age of networked communications. Next it examines epistolary fiction, where networked digital literature offers a different mode of subjectivity than that associated with the traditional novel. Finally, the book addresses two novels that incorporate aspects of networked literatures (fanfiction and comic books) to stake a claim for their enduring primacy as a literary form.

Between Novel and Network adds to conversations about how networked communication technologies affect literary form, content, metaphors, and reception. Readers will trace how concepts such as authorship, originality, intertextuality, and literary value play out across the digital literary sphere. As well as building upon the place of fanfiction in the literary field, Suzanne R. Black also offers a reappraisal of the place and characteristics of the novel in the twenty-first century as part of a larger literary ecosystem.

Suzanne R. Black is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh.