The Digital Future of English

The Future of English is among the first books to grapple with the distinct forms and formats that media production takes on in the networks, communities, and markets comprising what Murray has previously termed the digital literary sphere. It is an invaluable roadmap for the discipline. * Matthew Kirschenbaum, Author of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage * Murray lays out a bold plan to reinvent and reinvigorate literary studies for the age of digital media. What she proposes is not just to open the discipline to new kinds of object or to embrace new methods of analysis, but to reboot the whole program. I love this book for its audacious scope, its many concrete and practical suggestions, and its resolute optimism regarding possible future forms of bookish scholarship and teaching. * James F. English (U Pennsylvania), Author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value * Simone Murray offers a refreshingly new take on literary studies for the digital era. Rich in case-studies and institutional insights, The Digital Future of English shows that while print culture remains central to the public sphere, the rise and ramification of digital environments require that we rethink fundamentally what literature is and how we should study it. Integrating cultural sociology, media theory, book history, audience ethnography, and the digital humanities, Murray proposes a 'literary media studies' framework that will be essential reading for scholars and educators grappling with literature's evolving environments. * Günter Leypoldt (U Heidelberg), Author of Literature's Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value * Simone Murray continues her ground-breaking work on the digital literary sphere by offering a new disciplinary approach to English. What she calls 'literary media studies' starts from the crucial premise that 'without the book business, there is no literary culture' and then proceeds to model analyses of the digital platforms and institutions that shape reading today. Murray is a bridge-builder between academic and popular readers and makes an airtight case for why literary scholars ignore digital media at our peril. * Aarthi Vadde (Duke U), Co-editor of The Critic as Amateur * An astute assessment of the changing field of literary studies that explains the recent past and argues for rethinking disciplinary paradigms to include and, indeed embrace, digital media and media studies to ensure the vitality of literary studies for the future. This book is a must-read for students and practitioners of literary studies who want to understand how digital media has inspired new reading strategies, objects of study, and debates. * Jessica Pressman (San Diego State U), Author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age * Murray's reconceptualization of English as 'literary media studies' clears an inviting path forward for the discipline. Her many useful ideas for what such an enterprise would look like deserve careful consideration and wide debate. * Mark McGurl (Stanford U), Author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon * The Digital Future of English convincingly paints the bigger picture of what is currently at stake for literary studies and how the discipline needs to change. Reading the book gives me the urge to post quotes from it all over my literature department along with the message: you need to read this! * Karl Berglund (Uppsala U), Author of Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age * Simone Murray's The Digital Future of English: Literary Media Studies is a visionary reimagining of literary studies for the digital age-energetically dismantling outdated text-centric orthodoxies and replacing them with a media-aware framework that centres platforms, institutions, and readerly publics. With optimism and rigorous interdisciplinary insight, Murray doesn't just predict the future of the discipline but actively builds it, showing how digital technologies can revitalize methods, pedagogy, and engagement with literature in the 21st century. * Federico Pianzola (U Groningen), Author of Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the 21st Century *