Winner of the 2017 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2018 The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

Post-Digital charts the history of the digital revolution and gauges its impact on contemporary literature, art, criticism, and theory. Collecting more than 20 years' worth of major interventions from the pioneering journal electronic book review, this landmark 2-volume set contains close to 100 seminal articles from leading scholars, writers and digital artists, including Mark Amerika, Jan Baetens, Serge Bouchardon, Kiki Benzon, R. M. Berry, Anne Burdick, Stephen J. Burn, John Cayley, David Ciccoricco, Astrid Ensslin, David Golumbia, Paul Harris, N. Katherine Hayles, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Joseph McElroy, Brian McHale, Timothy Morton, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, John Durham Peters, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland, Ronald Sukenick, Joseph Tabbi, Cary Wolfe, Laura Dassow Walls and Rob Wittig. Post-Digital also includes new essays chronicling the most recent, multimodal developments in the literary field, a series of introductions by several generations of ebr co-editors surveying the long history of thinking about the digital, and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading.

William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.

William Gaddis published only four novels during his lifetime, but with those works he earned himself a reputation as one of America's greatest novelists. Less well known is Gaddis's body of excellent critical writings. Here is a wide range of his original essays, some published for the first time. From "'Stop Player. Joke No. 4,'" Gaddis's first national publication and the basis for his projected history of the player piano, to the title essay about missed opportunities in America during the past fifty years, to "Old Foes with New Faces," an examination of the relationship between the writer and the problem of religion—this diverse collection displays the power of an autonomous literary intelligence in an age increasingly dominated by political and religious conservatism.

A dying man lies in bed and embarks on a mental monologue on the mechanization of the arts, represented in the appearance of a mechanical piano. His reflections become a piercing diatribe against modern society and its deep-seated desires for fame and fortune. This novel is a heartbreaking story that does not grant any reprieve, and a superb diagnosis of the effects of technology, not only in the arts, but at the very core of contemporary everyday life. "Un hombre que yace en cama moribundo se embarca en un monologo mental a partir de la mecanizacion de las artes, representada en la aparicion de la pianola. Su reflexion termina por ser una punzante diatriba contra la sociedad moderna, con sus arraigados anhelos de fortuna y reconocimiento. Esta novela es un relato desgarrador que no concede respiro alguno y que es un magnifico diagnostico de los efectos de la tecnologia, no solo en el arte, sino en lo mas hondo de la vida cotidiana contemporanea."

The convergence of twentieth-century narrative and technology is one of the most important developments in current literary study. Roughly a decade after the founding of the Society for Literature and Science, and after the appearance of such influential books as Kathleen Woodward's Culture of Information and William Paulson's Noise of Culture, Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz have edited a landmark volume that seeks to summarize this still-emerging field. Through the essays and the wide-ranging overview provided by the editors' introduction, Reading Matters shows how these theoretical concerns can contribute to the practical study of narrative, and it helps to make the field far more accessible to students and other serious readers of fiction.

The twelve original essays, published here for the first time, are the work of distinguished scholar-critics on both sides of the Atlantic. They cover the range of contemporary literature, from the canonical novels of high modernism and postmodernism through subjects only recently put on the academic agenda, such as cyberpunk and hypertext fiction.

In an age that has proclaimed the death of the novel many times over, the editors and contributors argue persuasively for the continued vitality of literary narrative. By responding in ingenious ways to the capabilities of other media, they assert, the novel has enlarged and redefined its territory of representation and its range of techniques and play, while maintaining its viability in the new media assemblage.

Focusing on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing--the technological sublime.