Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3

Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3 features five works identified as a hypertext novel or interactive narrative. Several have been deemed by critics over the years as among the most important in the history of early born-digital writing. Rather than organizing them chronologically in this volume, we frame the book with the first hypertext novel ever published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. on Storyspace software––Michael Joyce's afternoon, story (1990)––and the most recent one the company published in the software's 3rd version––Mark Bernstein's Those Trojan Girls (2016). By doing so, we show the evolution of the genre and its connection to the technology underlying it. Within that framework we placed two other novels produced with other software that allows for sound and motion––M. D. Coverley's Califia (2000) and Megan Heyward's of day, of night (2014)––as a way of showing the breadth of the novel form over this period of literary history. Additionally, we insert Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) between the two multimedia-oriented novels to bring readers back to the dominant narrative form of the 1990s.