Book contents
- Space and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Space and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins Revisited
- Part II Developments
- Part III Applications and Extensions
- Chapter 16 Islands, Oceans, and the Production of Spatial Theory
- Chapter 17 Other/World(ly)
- Chapter 18 Imaginary Space
- Chapter 19 Digital Space
- Chapter 20 Sensory Geographies
- Chapter 21 Orientations
- Index
- References
Chapter 19 - Digital Space
from Part III - Applications and Extensions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Edited by
Book contents
- Space and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Space and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins Revisited
- Part II Developments
- Part III Applications and Extensions
- Chapter 16 Islands, Oceans, and the Production of Spatial Theory
- Chapter 17 Other/World(ly)
- Chapter 18 Imaginary Space
- Chapter 19 Digital Space
- Chapter 20 Sensory Geographies
- Chapter 21 Orientations
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter addresses the question of digital space in/and literary studies, exploring how literary fiction has been shaped by the digital and how it has, in turn, shaped conceptions of digital space. Across a period of roughly 35 years, the chapter traces changing understandings of digital space in and through the literary. Beginning with the emergence of cyberspace as a virtual, “placeless” space in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the concomitant but short-lived rise of hypertext theory, the chapter articulates how early formations of digital space were fundamentally bound up with questions of the literary. It then turns to more recent shifts in understanding the space of the digital as a more hybrid one that recognises social existence as being simultaneously, and co-constitutively, physical and virtual. To illustrate this more hybrid spatiality, the chapter draws focus to new dynamics of literary creation, distribution, and consumption as well as recent representations and remediations of this kind of hybrid spatiality in “internet” or “social media” novels that work to capture the compression of online and offline communicative social space.
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- Space and Literary Studies , pp. 319 - 335Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
References
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