Internet and literature — Some recent Hungarian examples

Abstract

Digital storage and retrieval of texts has been in the focus of an entire branch of contemporary literary studies. Literary texts online meant a new step, allowing readers to access (and editors to build and modify) the corpus in a radically new way, via the Internet. A recent development, however, the era of the network (with its “community sites” and all the different interactive communications between users) raises quite new issues. In addition to problems of archiving, accessibility and connectibility, the issues of literature produced and received on the Internet came to the fore, and deserve interest and theoretical reflection in their own right. In this study, some cases from the Hungarian internet scene concerning the temporality, authorial position, collective production, etc. are described, in order to call for a more systematic and thorough survey of these phenomena in general.