A Companion to Digital Literary Studies

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies provides the most thorough single-source exploration to date of the many intersections between literary studies and computation. These intersections are documented and explored by leading scholars, theorists, and practitioners and together they record the history, survey the present, and speculate on the future of this emerging and multi-faceted discipline. Articles are grouped into sections which gather and engage the most important scholarship from the field on topics ranging from scholarly editing and literary criticism, to interactive fiction, multimedia, immersive environments, and beyond.The Companion opens with period-specific surveys and engagements of how computational methods have been applied to a number of areas of literary studies, followed by an overview of the field's major theoretical and methodological perspectives related to new modes of writing and reading enabled by electronic text. Further sections investigate the new genres of electronic literature, including hypertext literature, installations, gaming, and weblogs, while providing an overview of formatting concerns and best practices for digital preservation. This volume is an accessible and practical resource for those who want to understand, use, or create digital literature.