Global Literature and the Digital

Global Literature and the Digital analyses the continued impact of the digital revolution upon contemporary literature. From the vantage of the 2020s, global literature possesses a digital sensibility where reality and perceptions are shaped by digital saturation and global networks. Time becomes on-demand and space seems to contract as we engage beyond national borders.

The book explores the influence of the digital: from the emergence of digital culture in the 1990s amid mediatization and interactivity, to the predominance of social media platforms in the 2000s and the rise of screen surveillance, to the more inclusive internet of the 2010s where digitally shared literatures promote ‘influencer’ writers from the Global South, shrinking the digital divide, to the 2020s, where post-digital norms render users complaisant to digital exploitation and the new crisis of AI. It discusses literature from over 30 countries across diverse literary forms including novels, poetry, nonfiction, blog fiction, AI-generated texts, videogames, and more.

As society struggles to process the rapid changes borne of our digital realities, Global Literature and the Digital asks whether nostalgia and distain for globalization hinders our potential to imagine a positive digitally enabled globalism, that calls for regulation, global justice, and solidarity. This comprehensive resource is an essential read for students and researchers of globalization, global literature, and digital humanities.