The Persistence of Genius: The Case for Stuart Moulthrop's "Victory Garden"

In his essay, “The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?,” Scott Rettberg discusses the impact of hypertext fiction before the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web, arguing that the "link and node hypertext" approach represented by early stand alone software like Storyspace was “eclipsed . . . by a range of other digital narrative forms” (Rettberg, “The American Hypertext Novel”). His essay goes on to reference important examples of hypertext fiction––Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (featured in Chapter 1 of this book) as well as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. Of these, both Joyce’s and Jackson’s novels are still accessible to the reading public; Moulthrop’s is not. As a digital preservationist of interactive media whose mission it is to maintain public access to our literary and cultural heritage, the question this essay asks is, “Has the lack of accessibility to Moulthrop’s novel affected research about it?”