Digital Literary Cultures: Web 2.0 and Beyond Reading List

“Digital Literary Cultures: Web 2.0 and Beyond Reading List” is a dynamic list of reading resources providing interdisciplinary insight into digital literary cultures. The presented literature focuses on post-digital literary society and contemporary literary culture more broadly as it intersects with platforms. Covering the consumption, distribution, and production of literature on Web 2.0 and beyond, the list is divided into four major sections, and, if relevant, accompanying subsections. Each starts with works that aim to conceptualize contemporary literary culture, and continues with more specific categories that cover different areas of the greater literary ecosystem. The list provides a broad overview of the storing, transmission and interpretation of digital literary culture from a humanistic perspective, going beyond a narrow definition of digital humanities.

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List managed by: Tanja Grubnic, Camilla Holm Soelseth, Magdalena Elisabeth Korecka, and Yasamin Razai.

Conceptualizing the Contemporary and Digital Literary Ecosystem:

These works provide a bird’s eye view of the field, in addition to closer analyses of specific aspects of the digital literary sphere. Topics explored include the post-digital; changing power dynamics; connectivity; remediation; and multimodality; as well as more specific aspects of the contemporary, digital literary ecosystem. Analyzed overviews include the changing literary spheres of poetry, amateur creativity, and books as literary objects.

Benthien, Claudia. “Poetry in the Digital Age.” Theories of Lyric. An Anthology of World Poetry Criticism, edited by Antonio Rodriguez, University of Lausanne, 2021. https://lyricology.org/poetry-in-the-digital-age/.

[original in French: https://www.theorie-lyrique.net/article/view/993].

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 1999.

Chasar, Mike. Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram, Columbia University Press, 2020.

Cramer, Florian. “What Is ‘Post-Digital’?” Postdigital Aesthetics, edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 12-26, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437204_2.

Crepax, Rosa. “The Aestheticisation of Feminism: A Case Study of Feminist Instagram Aesthetics.” ZoneModa Journal, vol. 10, no. 1S, 2020, pp. 71-81, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-0563/10555.

Edmond, Jacob. Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media, Columbia University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7312/edmo19002.

Edoro-Glines, Ainehi. “Unruly Archives: Literary form and the Social Media Imaginary.” ELH, vol. 89, no. 2, 2022, pp. 523-546. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0019.

Elleström, Lars. “The Modalities of Media. A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” Media Borders: Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 11-48.

Flores, Leonardo. “Third Generation Electronic Literature.” Electronic Book Review, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7273/axyj-3574.

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. “Sharing as Rescripting: Place Manipulations on YouTube Between Narrative and Social Media Affordances.” Discourse, Context, and Media, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 64-72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2015.07.002.

Johnson, Miriam J. “Digitally-Social Genre Fiction: Citizen Authors and the Changing Power Dynamics of Writing in Digital, Social Spaces.” Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 3, 2020, pp. 399-417. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1508067.

—. “What is a Book? Redefining the Book in the Digitally Social Age.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, 2019, pp. 68–78, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-018-9622-z.

Joshi, Priya. “Can Literary Theory be Participatory?” Post45, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism, 2019,

McGurl, Mark. Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, Verso Books, 2021.

Murray, Simon. The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2018.

Parnell, Claire. “Mapping the Entertainment Ecosystem of Wattpad: Platforms, Publishing, and Adaptation.” Convergence, vol. 27, no. 2, 2021, pp. 524-538. https://doi.org/10.1177/135485652097014.

Soelseth, Camilla H. “The media ecologies of Norwegian Instapoet Trygve Skaug: Tracing the post-digital circulation process of (insta)poetry through participatory-made Instagram archives.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 27, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2023.2200423

Thomas, Bronwen. Literature and Social Media, Routledge, 2020.

Vadde, Aarthi. “Amateur Creativity: Contemporary Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene.” New Literary History, vol. 48, no. 1, 2017, pp. 27-51, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2017.0001.

—. “Platform or Publisher?” PMLA. vol.136, no. 3, 2021, pp, 455-462. https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812921000341.

Theories of Platforms, Digital environments, Platformization, and Algorithms

This section covers the dominance of social media platforms as key actors and situated places shaping the production, distribution and consumption of literature. The objective is to gain a deeper understanding of (post-)digital spaces as spaces of—and infrastructure for—literature. This section therefore covers platform studies especially, and the connectivity of the internet more generally, from a media perspective.

Conceptual Works:

Bucher, Taina and Anne Helmond. “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, edited by Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell, Sage Publications, 2018, pp. 233-253.

Burgess, Jean and Nancy Baym. Twitter: A Biography, NYU Press, 2020.

Caliandro, Alessanra and James Graham. “Studying Instagram Beyond Selfies.” Social Media + Society, vol. 6, no. 2, 2020, pp. 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120924779.

Caranto Morford, Ashley and Jeffrey Ansloos. “Indigenous Sovereignty in Digital Territory: A Qualitative Study on Land-Based Relations with #Nativetwitter.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, vol. 17, no. 2, 2021, pp. 293-305. https://doi.org/10.1177/117718012110190.

Cunningham, Stuart and David Craig, editors. Creator Culture: An Introduction to Global Social Media Entertainment, NYU Press, 2021.

Cunningham, Stuart and David Craig, editors. Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, NYU Press, 2019.

van Dijck, José et al. The Platform Society, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Duarte, Marisa Elena. Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country, University of Washington Press, 2017.

Gillespie, Tarleton. “All Platforms Moderate.” The Custodians of the Internet. Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media, Yale University Press, 2018, pp. 1-23.

—. “The Myth of a Neutral Platform.” The Custodians of the Internet. Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media, Yale University Press, 2018, pp. 24-44.

—. “Platforms Intervene.” Social Media + Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115580479.

—. “Regulation of and by Platforms.” The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, edited by Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell, Sage Publications, 2018, pp. 254-278.

—. “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” New Media and Society, vol. 12, no. 3, 2010, pp. 347-364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738.

Hinton, Sam and Larissa Hjorth. Understanding Social Media, Sage Publications, 2019.

Jungselius, Beata. Using Social Media. Göteborgs Universitet, 2019. https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/handle/2077/61756/gupea_2077_61756_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

Leaver, Tama et al. Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, Polity Press, 2020.

Losh, Elizabeth. Hashtags, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, NYU Press, 2018.

Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, Harvard University Press, 2015.

Poell, Thomas et al. “Platformisation.” Internet Policy Review: Journal on Internet Regulation, vol. 8, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425.

Poell, Thomas et al. Platforms and Cultural Production, Polity Press, 2022.

Siles, Ignacio. “Toward a Popular Theory of Algorithms.” Popular Communication, vol. 20, no. 1, 2022, pp.1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2022.2103140.

Participatory Culture, Literary Community, and Civic Engagement

Social media platforms are defined by their connectivity, fostering participatory culture. This section concerns the practices related to participatory culture at large, including civic engagement and the use of literature in political protest and civic work. It is split into the following sub-categories; conceptual works; literary communities and their platforms; and evolving notions of the public figures. The last subcategory focuses on artists or producers of literary works and their different roles in the digital literary ecosystem.

Conceptual Works:

Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, Peter Lang, 2008

Jenkins, Henry, Mizuko Itō and danah boyd. Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics, Polity Press, 2016.

Literary Communities:

Boqo, Bella. “Let Black Girls Be: Unsettling Coloniality of Being in Upile Chisala’s (Insta)poetry.” The European Journal of English Studies. vol. 27, 2023. [Forthcoming].

Boffone, Trevor and Sarah Jerasa. “Toward a (Queer) Reading Community: BookTok, Teen Readers, and the Rise of TikTok Literacies.” Talking Points, vol. 33, no. 1, 2021, pp. 10-16. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/toward-queer-reading-community-booktok-teen/docview/2605656607/se-2.

Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. YouTube. Online Video and Participatory Culture. Polity Press, 2009.

Driscoll, Beth.“Readers of Popular Fiction and Emotion Online.” New Directions in Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction, edited by Ken Gelder, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp 425–449.

Grubnic, Tanja. “#indigenousauthor: Locating Tenille Campbell’s Erotic Poetry, Photography, and Community-Based Arts Beyond Social Media.” The European Journal of English Studies, vol. 27, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2023.2200492.

Kruger, Sasha. “The Technopo(e)litics of Rupi Kaur: (de)Colonial AestheTics and Spatial Narrations in the DigiFemme Age.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, Media, and Technology, no. 11, 2017. https://adanewmedia.org/2017/05/issue11-kruger/.

Rowe, John Carlos. “The Reader Writes Back: Social Media and the Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 50, no. 3, 2018, pp. 452-464. https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-4195096.

Celebrities, Creators, Producers, and Curators:

Arriagada, Arturo and Francisco Ibáñez. “You Need At Least One Picture Daily, if Not, You’re Dead”: Content Creators and Platform Evolution in the Social Media Ecology.” Social Media + Society, vol. 6, no. 3, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/205630512094462

Cotter, Kelley. “Playing the Visibility Game: How Digital Influencers and Algorithms Negotiate Influence on Instagram.” New Media & Society, vol. 21, no. 4, 2018, pp. 895–913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684.

Cunningham, Stuart and David Craig. “Being ‘Really Real’ on YouTube: Authenticity, Community and Brand Culture in Social Media Entertainment.” Media International Australia, vol. 164, no. 1, 2017, pp. 71-81. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X17709098.

—. “Creator Governance in Social Media Entertainment.” Social Media + Society, vol. 5, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/205630511988342.

Deresiewicz, William. The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, Henry Holt and Co., 2020.

Duffy, Brooke Erin. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work, Yale University Press, 2018.

Duffy, Brooke Erin et al. “Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries: Creativity, Labor, and Citizenship.” Social Media + Society, vol. 5, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1-8, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119879672.

Duffy, Brook Erin et al. “Mythologies of Creative Work in the Social Media Age: Fun, Free, and ‘Just Being Me.’” International Journal of Communication, vol. 11, 2017, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/7322/2185.

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. “Co-opting Small Stories on Social Media: A Narrative Analysis of the Directive of Authenticity.” Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication, vol. 43, no. 2, 2022, pp. 265-286. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642609.

Hansen, Kai Arne. “(Re)Reading Pop Personae: A Transmedial Approach to Studying the Multiple Construction of Artist Identities, Twentieth Century Music, vol. 16, no. 3, 2019, pp. 501-529. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572219000276.

Holm Soelseth, Camilla. “When Is a Poet an Instapoet?: The Effect of Platformization on the Practice of Being a Poet, and Instapoets as Examples of Poetry Content Creators in the Social Media Entertainment Ecosystem.” Baltic Screen Media Review, vol. 10, 2022, pp. 96-120. https://doi.org/10.2478/bsmr-2022-0008.

Johnson, Miriam J. “The Rise of the Citizen Author: Writing within Social Media.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2, 2017, pp. 131-146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-017-9505-8.

Specific Artifacts, Forms, Genres, Modalities:

While the previous categories concern the environment of literary artifacts, this category lists works that deal specifically with a type of artifact, a literary form, or a literary genre. This could either be digital born literature or post-digital literature. Within that, the traditional understanding of text and literature is broadened to encompass contemporary forms like literary games, or electronic literature.

Literary Studies Analysis and Criticism

Ansloos, Jeffrey and Ashley Caranto Morford. “Reading #NativeTwitter: A Qualitative Study of Indigenous Language Twitteratures. NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, vol. 9, no. 1, 2022, pp. 28-61. https://doi.org/10.1353/nai.2022.0011.

Berens, Kathi Inmen. “E-Literature’s #1 Hit: Is Instagram Poetry E-literature?” Electronic Book Review, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7273/9sz6-nj80.

Berens, Kathi Inmen. “Third Generation Electronic Literature and Artisanal Interfaces: Resistance in the Materials.” Electronic Book Review, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7273/c8a0-kb67.

Brouillette, Sarah. “Wattpad’s Fictions of Care.” Post45, Recent Uncollected Essays, 2022. https://post45.org/2022/07/wattpads-fictions-of-care/.

Cox, George. “Archived Bards: Platformalism, Hollie McNish & YouTube.” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings, vol. 8, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.1402.

Dawson, Paul. “Hashtag Narrative: Emergent Storytelling and Affective Publics in the Digital Age.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 6, 2020, pp. 968-983. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920921417.

Gaertner, David. “Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God’s Lake Narrows, and the Contours of Online Indigenous Territory.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 39, no. 4, 2015, pp. 55-78. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.39.4.gaertner.

Grubnic, Tanja. “Nosthetics: Instagram Poetry and the Convergence of Digital Media and Literature.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 9, no. 2, 2020, pp.145-163. https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00024_1.

—. “Platforms and Poetry as a Form of Popular Engagement.” Virtual Identities and Digital Culture, edited by Victoria Kannen and Aaron Langille, pp. 211-220, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003310730-25.

Kaipainen, Sini. “‘It’s What I Do’: A Close Reading of Lynsey Addario’s Instagram Profile as Digital Memoir.’” Persona Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2022, pp. 22-37. https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2022vol8no1art1520.

Knox, JuEunhae. “United we ‘Gram: Scrolling through the Assimilated Aesthetics of Instapoetry. Poetics Today, vol. 43, no. 3, 2022, pp. 479-532. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9780403.

Korecka, Magdalena Elisabeth and Wiebke Vorrath, editors. Lyrik und zeitgenössische Visuelle Kultur / Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture. Berlin/Boston, 2023. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111299334/html.

Leetsch, Jennifer. “From Instagram Poetry to Autofictional Memoir and Back Again: Experimental Black Life Writing in Yrsa Daley-Ward's Work.” Tusla Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 41, no. 2, 2022, pp. 301-326. https://doi.org/10.1353/tsw.2022.0022.

Mackay, James. “‘#morelove. always’: Reading Smokii Sumac’s Transmasculine First Nations Poetry on and beyond Social Media.” Transmotion, vol. 7, no.1, 2021, pp. 40-81. https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.928.

Manning, Maria. “Crafting Authenticity: Reality, Storytelling, and Female Self-Representation through Instapoetry. Storytelling, Self, Society, vol. 16, no. 2, 2020, pp. 263-279.

Miller, Alyson. “A Digital Revolution? Insiders, Outsiders, and the ‘Disruptive Potential’ of Instapoetry.” Arcadia International Journal for Literary Studies, vol. 56, no. 2, 2021, pp. 161–182. https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2021-9029.

Naji, Jeneen. Digital Poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, 2021.

O’Halloran, Kieran. “Postdigital Stylistics: Creative Multimodal Interpretation of Poetry and Internet Mashups.” English in Education, vol. 52, no. 1, 2022, pp.73-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2021.1937112.

O’Neill, Stephen. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of The Bard, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Pâquet, Lili. “Selfie-Help: The Multimodal Appeal of Instagram Poetry.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 52, no. 2, 2019, pp 296-314. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12780.

Perlow, Seth. “The Handwritten Styles of Instagram Poetry. Post45, Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism, 2019. https://post45.org/2019/09/the-handwritten-styles-of-instagram-poetry/.

Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age, Columbia University Press, 2020.

Shakargy, Noa. “‘I Am Not Myself, You See?’: Remediation and Mediatization in the Insta Novels Project.” Social Media + Society, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 1-11, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211030500.

Stollfuß, Sven. “Platformized Book Prosumption on Wattpad: Reading and Writing in the Case of a Pandemic Diary.” Book 2.0, vol. 11, no. 1, 2021, pp. 139-155. https://doi.org/10.1386/btwo_00049_1.