This book examines the radical thinking and experimentation creative writers have undertaken in the last 250 years, but particularly what they have achieved in the 20th and early 21st centuries. While it focuses on literary writing, it is not about literary theorists, literary critics, literary academics or their thinking. It is about writers and their motivations, their striving and frustration, problems they were challenged by and ways they overcame them. It concentrates on prose – on fiction particularly – although much that is radical in the history of writing has been done by poets; playwrights and screenwriters have contributed too. I am committed to fiction here because its history is now notably implicated in the changes occurring to writing in the digital age, for instance in the emergence of the app novel. Poets were quick to embrace the digital sphere in the 1990s, but the shift of fiction to digital platforms takes with it a far greater readership, and a far larger portion of publishing enterprise.

My aim in this book is to show that the transformative possibilities of the digital age have not been a sudden surprise to prose writing. Experimental writers were not ambushed by hypertext or hypermedia; in fact, they rehearsed them for more than a century without knowing what the new forms would be called, or what they would really look like. The technological turn that finally catered for their revolutionary ideas was never certain. Even so, poets and novelists – by looking across at other art forms, by attempting to escape the strictures of the printed page, by seeking ways of incorporating more of the senses (visual, aural, tactile) more immediately into reading – posited a new kind of writing whose time has now come. By seeking to encompass the verbal, visual and aural arts, radical writing set itself up for the hypermedia age.