Routledge Digital Literary Studies – serie

The Experimental Book Object shows why and how books matter in the 21st century. Digital and audio platforms are commonplace, and other fields of art beyond literature have increasingly embraced books and publication as their medium of choice. Nevertheless, the manifold book object persists and continues to inspire various types of experimentation. This volume sets forth an unprecedented approach where literary and media theory are entangled with design practitioners’ artistic research and process descriptions. By probing the paradigm of the codex, this collection of essays focuses on historical and contemporary experimentation that has challenged what books are and could be from the perspectives of materiality, mediation, and visual and typographic design. Investigations into less-studied areas and cases of performativity demonstrate what experimental books do by interacting with their systemic and cultural environments. The volume offers a multifaceted and multidisciplinary view of the book object, the book design and publishing processes, and their significance in the digital age.

The Experimental Book Object shows why and how books matter in the 21st century. Digital and audio platforms are commonplace, and other fields of art beyond literature have increasingly embraced books and publication as their medium of choice. Nevertheless, the manifold book object persists and continues to inspire various types of experimentation. This volume sets forth an unprecedented approach where literary and media theory are entangled with design practitioners’ artistic research and process descriptions. By probing the paradigm of the codex, this collection of essays focuses on historical and contemporary experimentation that has challenged what books are and could be from the perspectives of materiality, mediation, and visual and typographic design. Investigations into less-studied areas and cases of performativity demonstrate what experimental books do by interacting with their systemic and cultural environments. The volume offers a multifaceted and multidisciplinary view of the book object, the book design and publishing processes, and their significance in the digital age.

Formation of Periodical Authorship in 1920s Korea argues that Korean authors who entered the literary scene during modern literature’s formative years were the subject mediated by periodicals. However, it has been difficult to substantiate this statement because periodicals, including magazines, were open to different groups of writers; various social, literary, religious, and cultural discourses; and dissimilar genres. The multi-level interactions between terms, knowledge, and writing styles in circulation unfolded at a larger scale at some times, and at other times in such an ordinary manner that one can hardly identify and synthesize them to make any sense. Employing not only conventional close reading, but also modes of distant reading developing out of cultural analytics, Lee investigates the specific ways in which patterns of social, semantic, and stylistic interactions in Korea’s major magazines configured three kinds of authorship, namely the “narcissistic author,” the “prophetic critic,” and the “everyday reviewer.” He rereads artist stories, leftist social discourses, religious cosmology, and joint reviews through quantitative analyses and offers an engaging account on the importance of repetitions in creating literary originality. This book extends periodical studies through cultural analytics and opens up a new horizon for the next generation of literary scholars seeking innovative experiments in a digital age.

Formation of Periodical Authorship in 1920s Korea argues that Korean authors who entered the literary scene during modern literature’s formative years were the subject mediated by periodicals. However, it has been difficult to substantiate this statement because periodicals, including magazines, were open to different groups of writers; various social, literary, religious, and cultural discourses; and dissimilar genres. The multi-level interactions between terms, knowledge, and writing styles in circulation unfolded at a larger scale at some times, and at other times in such an ordinary manner that one can hardly identify and synthesize them to make any sense. Employing not only conventional close reading, but also modes of distant reading developing out of cultural analytics, Lee investigates the specific ways in which patterns of social, semantic, and stylistic interactions in Korea’s major magazines configured three kinds of authorship, namely the “narcissistic author,” the “prophetic critic,” and the “everyday reviewer.” He rereads artist stories, leftist social discourses, religious cosmology, and joint reviews through quantitative analyses and offers an engaging account on the importance of repetitions in creating literary originality. This book extends periodical studies through cultural analytics and opens up a new horizon for the next generation of literary scholars seeking innovative experiments in a digital age.

In 1985, Italo Calvino proposed six values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into the next millennium: lightness, quickness, ‘crystal’ exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Using Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium as structure and methodology, this book conjoins literary studies with creative practice to interrogate, extend/subvert, and then reflect on the aesthetic and structural ambitions of multiple innovative print authors (Italo Calvino, Zadie Smith, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Bernardine Evaristo, Roberto Bolano, Rachel Cusk, Shahriar Mandanipour, W.G. Sebald, Ross Gibson, Han Kang, and J.M. Coetzee) reimagined in new media in order to develop a model for digital literary practice-led research. This work contains four strands that are presented simultaneously. First, this monograph explores the rise of Calvino’s values within the Calvino corpus. Second, this value’s application to a contemporary literary predicament is explored through a digression. Third, conclusions from this interrogation are drawn as they relate to digital literary culture. Finally, the value’s importance is demonstrated through examining/reflecting on contemporary digital literary creative practice – both the author’s own and works created by contemporary writers/artists who have engaged with the digital postmodern.