Literature and Social Media

Description

From Instapoetry to BookTube, contemporary literary cultures and practices are increasingly intertwined with social media. In this lively and wide-ranging study, Bronwen Thomas explores how social media provides new ways of connecting with and rediscovering established literary works and authors while also facilitating the emergence of unique and distinctive forms of creative expression. The book takes a 360˚ approach to the subject, combining analysis of current forms and practices with an examination of how social media fosters ongoing collaborative discourse amongst both informal and formal literary networks, and demonstrating how the participatory practices of social media have the potential to radically transform how literature is produced, shared and circulated. The first study of its kind to focus specifically on social media, Literature and Social Media provides a timely and engaging account of the state of the art, while interrogating the rhetoric that so often accompanies discussion of the ‘new’ in this context. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures Note Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Preface Introduction Why ‘literature’ and ‘social media’ are not antithetical The rise of social media and key issues/critiques Technology and literature Key theoretical approaches and influences Forms of social media Implications of social media for literature Methods 1. From the Holodeck to the Tweetdeck: electronic literature, interactivity and participation The ‘End of Books’? Defining the field The Brave New World of hypertext fiction Beyond hypertext and the impact of Web 2.0 Readers/audiences/users Fans, participatory cultures and transmedia storytelling Literature on the go Network aesthetics and the politics of new media 2. Old wine in new bottles? Retelling and reimagining the literary with social media Social media accounts based on literary works and authors New forms of participation Generating faux classics, traditions and myths New wine in old bottles: incorporating new technology in the novel Social media in the novel 3. The Twittersphere as literary playground Twitter as a platform for creativity ‘Small stories’ and the need for new methods and approaches The emergence of Twitterfiction Experiments with automation ‘Nowness’ and liminality Distribution Genre and audience Poetry and performance 4. Canons and curators: accessing, preserving and evaluating the literary on social media The curatorial turn Canons and fanons Curating the everyday Celebrity curators Literature on display Tracking and cataloguing the literary Literary data 5. Literary movements in the network era The problem with ‘community’ Net-working Literary movements Instapoetry Wu Ming Alt Lit 6. New literary cultures and markets Authorship Fans, amateurs and reader–writers Literary advice New publishing models Festivals and prizes Mass reading events Reader power Afterword Glossary References Index