Analyzing Digital Fiction
Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics Series

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.

1.Introduction: From Theorizing to Analyzing Digital Fiction Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian RustadSection 1: Narratological Approaches 2. Media-Specific Metalepsis in 10:01 Alice Bell 3.Digital Fiction and Worlds of Perspective David Ciccoricco 4. Seeing into the Worlds of Digital Fiction Daniel PundaySection2: Social Media and Ludological Approaches 5. Playing with rather than by the Rules: Metaludicity, Allusive Fallacy and Illusory Agency in The Path. Astrid Ensslin 6. 140 Characters in Search of a Story: Twitterfiction as an Emerging Narrative Form Bronwen Thomas 7. Amnesia, the Dark Descent: The Player's Very Own Purgatory Susana Tosca 8. Wreading Together: The Double Plot of Collaborative Digital Fiction Isabell KlaiberSection 3: Semiotic-Rhetorical Approaches 9. (In-)Between Word, Image and Sound: Cultural Encounter in Flight Paths. Hans Kristian Rustad 10. Figures of Gestural Manipulation in Digital Fictions Serge Bouchardon 11. Hyperfiction as a Medium for Drifting Times: A Close Reading of the German Hyperfiction Zeit für die Bombe Alexandra Saemmer Afterword Roberto Simanowski

Alice Bell is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

Astrid Ensslin is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at Bangor University, UK.

Hans Rustad is Associate Professor in Literature and New Media Communication at Hedmark University College, Norway.