Welcome to the Cambridge Elements in Digital Literary Studies series. This series defines and expands the elements of digital literary studies through a series of short exemplary texts. Elements combine the literary and the digital to address questions situated within a defined area of literary studies, and articulate clear conclusions on the literary insights achieved. They are intended to serve as a new model for working, teaching, and thinking within the contested terrain of digital literary studies now: affording extensive digital argumentation and archival support, underpinned by Cambridge’s Core platform for born-digital publication, and printed in affordable editions for classroom use and personal reference.

This series asks how digital mediation transforms literary studies and how literary studies might transform digital texts, technologies, and cultures. Literature has experienced two great medium shifts, each with profound implications for its forms, genres, and cultures: from orality to writing, and from writing to printing. Today we are experiencing a third great shift. As with these previous shifts, the current transformation is reconfiguring literature and literary culture at the same time as it is altering the methods and materialities of literary research. Literary texts are today composed, edited, distributed, marketed, consumed, and discussed in digital formats, a shift that has radically accelerated during the pandemic. Literary research, itself increasingly conducted in digital forms, has begun to engage digitized literary texts and archives, employ computational analysis, and study the shifting institutional and professional configurations of the digital literary sphere. Yet far from superseding their analogue predecessors, digital forms and methods exist alongside print culture in complex relations of competition, filiation, and adaptation.

Digital literary studies is the field where these transformations are playing out. Although digital literary studies has had a significant role in shaping the broader digital humanities, the focus of this series is squarely on how the medial and methodological turn to the digital is advancing insights in literary studies. It thus advances the critical understanding of how literary epistemologies and ontologies speak to, or differ from, other computational work in the humanities. Titles in the series advance the state of the art across a range of national and linguistic contexts while remaining clearly bound to literary-critical advances, literary-historical narratives, and literary texts. Elements will be clearly accessible, describe a replicable method of inquiry, and focused on the literary fruits of their particular inquiry.

Some Elements will take up large questions of interest to literary studies as a whole, as in case of Andrew Piper’s forthcoming volume: how do we generalize our claims about literary texts? Other Elements will focus on particular disciplinary and field topics: on literary geography, on Latin American digital poetics, on Instapoetry, on digital editions and diasporas. What major categories of literary investigation are coming under pressure in the digital age? Conversely, what methods of literary investigation are finding new relevance and application? How are our disciplines reevaluating core concepts like periods, canons, archives, narratives, materiality, and authorship? How are traditional forms — the novel, the book, the marketplace, the monograph — responding and adapting to digital mediation? How might we use established literary methods to read digital narratives, poems, games, and social texts? These are among the questions our titles will engage.

Discover more about this series here.