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This thesis examines key examples of materially experimental writing (B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1, and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch), hypertext fiction (Geoff Ryman's 253, in both the online and print versions), and video games (Catherine, L.A. Noire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Phantasmagoria), and asks what new critical understanding of these 'interactive' texts, and their broader significance, can be developed by considering the examples as part of a textual continuum. Chapter one focuses on materially experimental writing as part of the textual continuum that is discussed throughout this thesis. It examines the form, function, and reception of key texts, and unpicks emerging issues surrounding truth and realism, the idea of the ostensibly 'infinite' text in relation to multicursality and potentiality, and the significance of the presence of authorial instructions that explain to readers how to interact with the texts. The discussions of chapter two centre on hypertext fiction, and examine the significance of new technologies to the acts of reading and writing. This chapter addresses hypertext fiction as part of the continuum on which materially experimental writing and video games are placed, and explores reciprocal concerns of reader agency, multicursality, and the idea of the 'naturalness' of hypertext as a method of reading and writing. Chapter three examines video games as part of the continuum, exploring the relationship between print textuality and digital textuality. This chapter draws together the discussions of reciprocity that are ongoing throughout the thesis, examines the significance of open world gaming environments to player agency, and unpicks the idea of empowerment in players and readers. This chapter concludes with a discussion of possible cultural reasons behind what I argue is the reader's/player's desire for a high level of perceived agency.The significance of this thesis, then, lies in how it establishes the existence of several reciprocal concerns in these texts including multicursality/potentiality, realism and the accurate representation of truth and, in particular, player and reader agency, which allow the texts to be placed on a textual continuum. This enables cross-media discussions of the reciprocal concerns raised in the texts, which ultimately reveals the ways in which our experiences with these interactive texts are deeply connected to our anxieties about agency in a cultural context in which individualism is encouraged, but our actual individual agency is highly limited.

he annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an institution that has endured for almost 20 years, with the goal of discovering each year’s best and brightest works in the world of text-based gaming. The genre is surprisingly broad and complex – and this year’s entries show how much text games have to offer modern audiences, even those who don’t ordinarily play computer games.

The age of free and intuitive creation tools, combined with the explosion of mobile platforms, e-reader devices and an audience that’s comfortable reading screens, means a brand-new opportunity for fresh narrative experiences that stand to attract new types of players.

Veteran gamers may remember the text-based adventures of history – titles like Adventureland, Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arriving in the late 1970s and early 80s, they were taut, forbidding puzzles of logic and language; proceeding the age of graphics on home computers, they made the most of constraints, using brief, carefully chosen prose and a limited list of terse commands to create the experience.

Now that we're all getting comfortable with the notion of reading books on digital displays, it's little surprise that developers are starting to explore the interactive possibilities of electronic novels. In fact, simple interactive fiction has been available on the iPod since the very beginning, with a community of writers using the HTML functionality in the device's Notes application to create "choose your own adventure" stories.

Since then, the actual Choose Your Own Adventure Company, which now owns the rights to the classic interactive children's novels, has ported a couple of old favourites to iPhone. Meanwhile, Edward Packard, the original author and creator of the CYOA series, has a new brand name, U-Ventures and is adapting and updating many of his old titles for iOS platforms.

The novel is digital, it was digital, and it will be digital. Most authors have written on word processors and most publishers have made books with some form of desktop publishing software since the early 1990s. The first novels for digital display were written and published in the late 1980s. From a literary perspective, the question is whether such digital-born literature translates into palpable changes in the novel form, why, and how.

Previoustheories of the meeting of digital technology and literature have all too often presented a predetermined fate for this pairing—an essentialist vision of literature, technology, or both. I begin by showing this process at work in the creation of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987), the most well-known hypertext fiction. Joyce’s work is often understood as evidence that hypertext and digital technologies were inherently suited to experimental practice. I show, instead, that hypertext technology was initially reader and user friendly, and that the experimentalism of afternoon should be credited to Joyce’s literary goals. Print books also became digitally born in the 1990s, with all major American publishers shifting to digital typesetting (or desktop publishing). This largely unnoticed shift shows a technology developing according to the particular state of the publishing industry during this period, and the fading influence of high postmodern literary style. I show how three authors—Mark Z. Danielewski, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Díaz—turn digital technology toward more narrative means during this period, augmenting textual meaning with an enhanced typographical paratext. Last, I look at a digital book within a book, the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995), to show how this digital book remediates the social and contextual aspects of the early British novel. The Primer shows how clearly digital fiction has been defined as highly experimental, and how this constricts how we think about digital fiction and what it can be. Digitizing the novel has not meant something stable or predefined, but is a moving target, shifting to account for context, public, and literary moment.

This dissertation explores the relationships between literacy, technology, and bodies in the emerging media of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). In response to the recent, rapid emergence of new media forms, questions arise as to how and why we should prepare to compose in new digital media. To interrogate the newness accorded to new media composing, I historicize the literacy practices demanded by new media by examining digital texts, such as video games and software applications, alongside analogous “antiquated” media, such as dioramas and museum exhibits. Comparative textual analysis of analogous digital and non-digital VR, AR, and MR texts reveals new media and “antiquated” media utilize common characteristics of dimensionality, layering, and absence/presence, respectively. The establishment of shared traits demonstrates how media operate on a continuum of mutually held textual practices; despite their distinctive forms, new media texts do not represent either a hierarchical or linear progression of maturing development. Such an understanding aids composing in new VR, AR, and MR media by enabling composers to make fuller use of prior knowledge in a rapidly evolving new media environment, a finding significant both for educators and communicators. As these technologies mature, we will continue to compose both traditional and new forms of texts. As such, we need literacy theory that attends to both the traditional and the new and also is comprehensive enough to encompass future acts of composing in media yet to emerge.

In her article "Electronic Literature in China" Jinghua Guo discusses how the reception and the critical contexts of production of online literature are different in China from those in the West despite similar developments in digital technology. Guo traces the development of Chinese digital literature, its history, and the particular characteristics and unique cultural significance in the context of Chinese culture where communality is an aspect of society. Guo posits that Chinese electronic literature is larger than such in the West despite technical drawbacks and suggests that digitality represents a positive force in contemporary Chinese culture and literature.