Fiction and Cyberspace: Reading Dickens in the Information Age
Moving from Dickens’s unfailing popularity as a successful cultural icon, this article addresses the relevance of literary classics in the face of the impact of digital communication and of experimental writing forms on the Internet, in the attempt to trace an ideal trajectory of the history and the...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2012-01-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/cve/12215 |
| Summary: | Moving from Dickens’s unfailing popularity as a successful cultural icon, this article addresses the relevance of literary classics in the face of the impact of digital communication and of experimental writing forms on the Internet, in the attempt to trace an ideal trajectory of the history and the future of narrative from old to new media. Several analogies are detectable between the construction of fictional worlds typical of Victorian novels and digital entertainment media and storytelling genres, while the intense reader engagement Dickens established between his fiction and the social world is remindful of the online/offline identity performance of Internet users. The conclusive evidence that, despite many similarities, the digital turn of new media marks a major break with past knowledge paradigms, whose consequences are still to be fully assessed, does not detract in any ways from the meaningfulness of literary discourse in the Information Age, whose unending transformations call for a renewed critical activity. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |