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The highly productive subfield of literary studies analysing digital fiction has so far primarily focussed on what makes these digital phenomena new and thus different from their analogue predecessors. This book takes these valuable approaches as a given and sets out to add another piece to the mosaic by instead foregrounding continuities, historical parallels, and pre-digital literary theory to analyse these seemingly new phenomena in a larger context of cultural production and human expression. This introductory chapter outlines the main aims of the book, provides an overview of the material considered in the analysis, and orients the reader in the overall structure of the following chapters.

The highly productive subfield of literary studies analysing digital fiction has so far primarily focussed on what makes these digital phenomena new and thus different from their analogue predecessors. This book takes these valuable approaches as a given and sets out to add another piece to the mosaic by instead foregrounding continuities, historical parallels, and pre-digital literary theory to analyse these seemingly new phenomena in a larger context of cultural production and human expression. This introductory chapter outlines the main aims of the book, provides an overview of the material considered in the analysis, and orients the reader in the overall structure of the following chapters.

This chapter introduces the idea of a postformalist aesthetic theory of reconstructing remote artefacts aesthetic statuses. The case is immune to the misgivings about aesthetic enquiry prevalent in the humanities and social sciences, since it does not assume that recovering such statuses involves experiencing the artefacts potential to provide an intrinsically rewarding gratification of the senses, of the intellect, or of both together. Postformalist aesthetics sees itself as part of a broad investigation into the nature of evaluative attitudes towards visually conspicuous artefacts. Such a broad investigation represents a necessary step towards establishing whether an object was meant to merit aesthetic attention.