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This introductory chapter begins with a description of the basic features of Internet literature in China—it is Chinese-language writing, either in established literary genres or in innovative literary forms, written especially for publication in an interactive online context and meant to be read on-screen. The discussions then turn to the main debates in three areas of study that are directly relevant to the present volume: electronic literature, Chinese Internet studies, and postsocialism. The remainder of the chapter details the methodology used in the present study and sets out the book's main objectives: to describe the general phenomenon of Internet literature in China; to analyze examples of literary innovation taking place online; and to show how online publications push the boundaries of the state-regulated publishing system, especially the moral boundaries of what is ideologically considered to be healthy literature. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

On LinguaMOO, hosted at the University of Texas at Dallas from circa 1999 to 2003, the author conducted a series of online chats from her apartment in Colorado -- at first, on her own, and then sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). She invited lecturers and the electronic literature community; served virtual tea, coffee and pastry; introduced guests and suggested topics. Discussions included archiving, tools, the differences between print literature and electronic literature, the definition of electronic literature, readers of electronic literature, and the future of electronic literature. Participants included Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Robert Kendall, Talan Memmott, Jennifer Ley, Nick Monfort, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Stuart Moulthrop, M.D. Coverley, Stephanie Strickland, John McDaid, Bill Bly, Sue Thomas, and Katherine Hayles, among many others. In addition to discussions and participants, this chapter also details the use of MOOs for online discussion and the creation of archives for the ELO Chats.

Initiated by Carl Loeffler, Director of the San Francisco artspace La Mamelle/Art Com, who had been working on artists' telecommunications projects since the 1977 Send/Receive Project, Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) was implemented on The WELL by artist Fred Truck in the Spring of 1986. Loeffler's vision was to create an online environment for contemporary art that included electronic publication of art journals; an art-centered conferencing system; and interactive publication of computer-mediated artworks and electronic literature. How Loeffler and Truck began a collaboration that resulted in an historic social media platform; how ACEN brought artists online; published text art and electronic literature, including John Cage‘s First Meeting of the Satie Society and Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger; and mounted a travelling exhibition of artists software, is detailed in this interview with Fred Truck -- with the participation of Anna Couey, who began editing Art Com Magazine online in 1990.

This chapters challenges the accepted view that Judy Malloy produced four versions of her pioneering work of electronic literature, Uncle Roger, showing through material uncovered from archival research, interviews, and Traversals, that there are instead six. Through a close reading of each version, the chapter also reveals subtle as well as significant changes the author made to the work during its 30-year history.

This chapter traces a constellation of literary efforts to represent cognition with and through media. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the central node in this network, the inspiration for a variety of digital modernist works that adapt stream of consciousness. Diverse digital works include a Twitter-based performance of “Wandering Rocks” (by Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy), a generative, database-driven performance artwork (Talan Memmott’s My Molly [Departed]), and a complex narrative inspired by a section of “Ithaca” (Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter). Considering these works together and in relation to their modernist source of inspiration shows how stream of consciousness, that central literary technique for representing consciousness in twentieth-century literature that came to the fore through modernism, is decidedly about media. This chapter shows how contemporary literature updates modernist techniques for depicting human consciousness to reflect changes as its subject becomes posthuman and its medium becomes digital.

Digital poetry case-studies. The chapter begins with precedents, typographic explorers, and parallel practitioners. The bulk of the chapter offers numerous case-studies of contemporary (1995-2015) digital poetry (and/or language-art in mediated contexts) grouped by thematics. Authors analysed include (among others): Christian Bök, Zuzana Husárová, Joe Davis, Eduardo Kac, S. S. Prasad, Jason Lewis, Erik Loyer, Andy Campbell, Ben Fry, Amaranth Borsuk, Christophe Bruno, Talan Memmott, Jaap Blonk, Daniel Howe, Karsten Schmidt, Brad Troemel, TRAUMAWIEN, Darius Kazemi, Ray Kurzweil, John Cayley, Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Antonio Roque, Håkan Jonson, Johannes Heldén, Danny Cannizzaro, Samantha Gorman, and Camille Henrot.

Software defines what digital poetry is. This chapter explores the temporal implications of animation time lines on the literary imagination. Read it if you are concerned with software studies and/or creative media. It argues that an authoring environment specific to the literary must emerge. Chapter includes a rapid overview of most of the authoring tools and code languages used by contemporary poets. Software examined includes: After Effects, Mudbox, Mr Softie, Flash, VMRL, and Second Life; and the programming languages Processing, RitaJS, Python, and C++.

For literary theorists, critics, students, and philosophically inclined readers: this chapter provides an overview of theories about language that leads toward a notion of spoems (poetic objects), outlines a brief history of image-texts, attempts a symbiotic merger between two historically distinct ways (materiality and ontologies) of considering poetry, and contains central arguments about aesthetic animism. These concern the plausibility of living language as an outcome of the convergence of literature and computation, the volumetric possibility that archetypal letterforms relate to internal physiognomy, and discourse on how these archetypal forms might be attained in ways that are both synesthetic and synergetic.

The final chapter proposes a few seemingly ludicrous, perhaps-prescient prophecies. Auto-writing bots, emotive reverse-engineering, and an inexhaustible muse. I’m an artist taking refuge in academia. I make “big” claims. In this era of advanced entropy, it seems appropriate to suggest the edges, to surrender into a contingent infinite. This chapter imagines what literature will be in 5 years. Reverse engineering ingenuity and poetic sensibility may seem distant and speculative. Can irony be engineered? Can societal shock? Topologically, it does not seem intractable. In this chapter, I do what poets do: speculate, make the bones dance, read the fire, discern patterns in the entrails of an unborn animal, and imagine a fusion of three active literature/poetry portals–PennSound, Poetry Foundation, and Jacket2–on the Web in the year 2020.

Read this if you are arriving from the humanities or literature. It introduces the subject of digital poetry, and outlines the general argument and methodological approaches (theoretical synthesis, deep-readings of key works, and software-centric analysis). It also defines new terms, TAVs (textual audiovisuals) and TAVITs (textual audiovisual interactives).