Reviews
Murray provides an astute overview of the ways in which traditional literary activities have been reshaped by digital technologies. I enjoyed the book immensely. It is comprehensive and provides clear examples and understanding within its chosen framing. For anyone interested in how literary scholars understand their place in the digital world, it is a terrific read.
A spirited endeavour to snap literary studies out of its digital slumber. Expertly written and with remarkable interdisciplinarity, Murray embarks on charting what she terms the 'digital literary sphere'—a Habermasian look into the new context of literature and literary culture in the age of the internet.
The Digital Literary Sphere is a valuable primer on the contemporary state of literature in an internet culture. The thorough approach of Murray's work provides an institutional and cultural history for how digital literature arrived at its present moment.
A watershed book by Simone Murray, one of the shrewdest and most penetrating scholars of today’s rapidly changing cultural landscape. The Digital Literary Sphere brings analytical clarity and original insights to an important topic. Here is a brilliantly flexible paradigm that future historians of literary culture will apply to the new technologies and altered circumstances that lie ahead.
An excellent and insightful study that provides a fascinating introduction to the world of digital books, publishing, and literature in the twenty-first century. Murray draws on a wealth of methodologies, combining a deep and broad familiarity with contemporary book culture with the most advanced critical thinking on authorship, reading, and mediation.
The Digital Literary Sphere will quickly become the official guide to the way that digital media and contemporary literary culture intersect and inform one another. Murray demonstrates that digital media are less a threat to the literary realm than a means of extending its reach, propping up its resilient cultural value by enabling new forms of literary curation, connoisseurship, and self-improvement.
From book trailers to virtual festivals, this study provides a useful ‘matrix model’ for charting the shifting landscape of the literary in the digital age. Simone Murray issues a stirring challenge to scholars from book history, literary studies, and the digital humanities to engage with emergent practices and platforms and to work together to future proof their respective disciplines.
The Digital Literary Sphere gives us a glimpse of the future of the history of the book through a matrix of websites and digital platforms encompassing all aspects of contemporary literary production and consumption. This is a rigorous work of cultural critique in the tradition of Habermas, Bourdieu, and Darnton.
A capacious and elegant exposé of the digital literary sphere in all its energetic unruliness. Murray challenges scholars to reframe contemporary online media as a dynamic, socially-inflected convergence of creation, circulation, and consumption and compellingly argues for cross-disciplinary détente between book history, literary studies, new media studies, and digital humanities.
Rooted in interdisciplinary but deeply humanistic research, Murray’s fascinating study addresses the relation between literature and the digital with a strong theoretical and analytical focus. It is a sharp approach to new material and a formidable feat to pinpoint so many of the ever-changing characteristics in the digital realm.
Murray's book is a benchmark work in the field because she explores the interconnectedness of marketing, authorship, and critical evaluation in the realm of digital literary culture with a high degree of theoretical sophistication. The scope of her book is awe-inspiring, but she also drills down deep in each and every chapter, providing one revelatory case study after another. I look forward to teaching this book for many years to come.
Book Details
List of Figures and Table
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Charting the Digital Literary Sphere
1 Performing Authorship in the Digital Literary Sphere
2 "Selling" Literature
List of Figures and Table
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Charting the Digital Literary Sphere
1 Performing Authorship in the Digital Literary Sphere
2 "Selling" Literature: Cultivating Community in the Digital Literary Sphere
3 Curating the Public Life of Literature: Literary Festivals Online
4 Consecrating the Literary: Book Review Culture and the Digital Literary Sphere
5 Entering Literary Discussion: Fiction Reading Online
Conclusion: Accounting for Digital Paratext
Notes
References
Index