AustLit

'The novel has been consistently threatened by competition from new mediums. From modernism to postmodernism and beyond, many writers have responded to this competition by innovating and incorporating new styles, forms and techniques for the novel. In the digital age, despite the threat to print from online sources, linear print novels remain the dominant fictional mode – even though most of us communicate and consume through a discontinuous array of digital media that bears little resemblance to them. Adam Hammond has declared ours a ‘hybrid moment … [in which we have] one foot in the print world and the other in the digital’ (2016). Recently authors have published augmented books – print novels enhanced with additional digital components – which belong to a wider category of intermedial narratives (Ryan 2016). This paper analyses the hybrid print-digital forms of Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad; positions the combination of print and digital narrative as a modern innovation in response to media competition; and argues that such approaches remediate the novel in ways that allow authors to reflect our hyper-attentive digital with fidelity.'  (Publication abstract)