‘Fictions of the Internet’: From Intermediality to Transmedia Storytelling in 21st-Century Novels by Anna Weigel-Heller

Abstract

 Reviews are omitted. She had five children, for example, yet the oen all-encompassing act of mothering gets barely a mention—except as a sort of timeline-marking event here and there. Is this a success of the study, or a failure? ere is almost no time to answer, as the book is busy pursuing the erasure of superstructures at large. e book is generous in pointing out routes of access to such gorgeously complex poetry, refusing to keep the signs of Di Prima’s magic to itself. U  R Y S ‘Fictions of the Internet’: From Intermediality to Transmedia Storytelling in stCentury Novels. By A W-H. (Research on Alternative Varieties of Exploration in Narrative, ) Trier: Wissenschalicher Verlag Trier. . xvi+ pp. €.. ISBN ––––. ‘We are in the midst of a paradigm shi in writing and reading novels’, argues Anna Weigel-Heller (p. ). She is referring to digital textuality and what happens to literature when it interfaces with both digital technology and digital culture. Weigel-Heller completed her doctoral research in English and American literary studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen and the University of Helsinki in . She has published articles on intermedial and transmedial storytelling as well as on the emergence of new genres. In this new volume, Weigel-Heller explores how ‘the contemporary novel has responded to the overall media developments of the st century’ (p. ). She coins the label ‘fictions of the Internet’ to describe all the innovative twenty-first-century novels that deal with and make use of new media and the Internet through their content, form, materiality, technological support, or interactive features. Weigel-Heller includes seven case studies and broadly examines  contemporary literary works using a combination of text-centred, transgeneric, transmedial, and culture-oriented methods from literary, cultural, and media studies. She focuses on three main concepts and contributes specifically to the ongoing debates within ‘intermediality’, ‘transmedia storytelling’, and ‘genre/generic change’. Her work fills the gap in the area of intermedial and transmedial relations between twenty-firstcentury novels and new media, with the aim of systematizing the manifold new tendencies in contemporary writings. ‘More and more st-century writers are beginning to invoke new media in their literary texts and explore the limits of the novel as a medium’, says WeigelHeller (p. ). She provides evidence of how contemporary writers do not simply add intermedial references to their stories but instead ‘use media for a variety of storytelling purposes’, sometimes even revealing ‘the potential and limits of writing’ (Daniel Punday, Writing at the Limit: e Novel in the New Media Ecology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. ; quoted in the current volume, p. ). She thus demonstrates the transformation of old literary genres and the creation of new genres owing to the influence of new media and technologies. Furthermore, she asserts that literary and media scholars must come to terms with these rapidly evolving literary innovations, which she categorizes by proposing new genres such MLR, .,   as ‘psychological Internet thriller’, ‘Facebook novel’, ‘Internet satire’, ‘multimedia novel’, and ‘Internet-enhanced mystery novel’ (p. ). She suggests that, over the coming years, the book market will continue to change in response to the Internet and new media; existing subgenres will be modified, new subgenres created, and ‘fictions of the Internet’ may even be recognized as a distinct genre itself. Indeed, the ongoing digitization of books and the use of transmedia storytelling force us to rethink existing literary theories, concepts, and methods. In recent decades, traditional narratology and interdisciplinary narrative research have expanded with the ongoing development of a host of new approaches, leading to an increasingly transgeneric, intermedial, and interdisciplinary narrative theory. ‘Fictions of the Internet’ is a valuable addition to this field and offers a new set of analytical tools for exploring narrative and storytelling, opening up new works, concepts, methods, and horizons for research. Most interestingly, Weigel-Heller discusses how narrative structure changes through the intimation of new media. However, the works that she reviews are interesting not only for the sake of their newness. On the contrary, there is much they can expose about what was previously regarded as normal, canonical, or valuable, in terms of both literature and literacy. is...