ABSTRACT

Written for and read on a computer screen, digital fiction pursues its verbal, discursive and conceptual complexity through the digital medium. It is fiction whose structure, form and meaning are dictated by the digital context in which it is produced and requires analytical approaches that are sensitive to its status as a digital artifact. Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

part |17 pages

Introduction

part I|54 pages

Narratological Approaches

part II|68 pages

Social Media and Ludological Approaches

chapter 5|19 pages

Playing with Rather than by the Rules

Metaludicity, Allusive Fallacy, and Illusory Agency in The Path

chapter 6|15 pages

140 Characters in Search of a Story

Twitterfiction as an Emerging Narrative Form

chapter 7|15 pages

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

The Player's Very Own Purgatory

chapter 8|17 pages

Wreading Together

The Double Plot of Collaborative Digital Fiction

part III|53 pages

Semiotic-Rhetorical Approaches

chapter 9|16 pages

(In-)between Word, Image, and Sound

Cultural Encounter in Pullinger and Joseph's Flight Paths

chapter 11|18 pages

Hyperfiction as a Medium for Drifting Times

A Close Reading of the German Hyperfiction Zeit für die Bombe

part |12 pages

Afterword

chapter 12|10 pages

Reading Digital Fiction

From Hypertext to Timeline