Abstract
"Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations. The book understands 'global' as a mode of comparative thinking and argues for considering various forms of digital literature-the popular, the avant-garde, and the participatory-as realizing and producing global thought in the twenty-first century. Attending to issues of both political and aesthetic representation, the book includes a diverse group of contributors and a diverse corpus of texts, composed in a variety of languages and regions, including East and South Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia, and Africa. The book's contributors adopt a wide array of interpretive approaches to make visible new connections and possibilities engendered by cross-cultural encounters. Among other topics, they reflect on the shifting conditions for production and distribution of literature, participatory cultures and technological affordances of Web 2.0, the ever-changing dynamics of global and local forces, and address fundamental questions such as, what do we mean when we talk about literature today? What is the future of literature?"--