Internet Fictions

World Wide Web inventor Timothy Berners-Lee envisioned a place where we could communicate by sharing information, globally and universally. After roughly 15 years of Internet-based fiction, the authors have attempted an overview of its development and examine the differing forms and sites where it is practiced. They bring a variety of perspectives and expertise to the project: literature, linguistics, and media and cultural studies. They explore the phenomena of hyperfiction and fan fiction, policing language use and textuality in fan fiction, feminist and transgender discourses on the changing bodies of slash fan fiction, narration, branding, blogging, and related topics. It is a thought-provoking and interesting collection for anyone with an interest in how the Internet has changed the way we communicate and, possibly, why. Editors Hotz-Davies (English literature and gender studies, U. of Tubingen, Germany), Kirchhofer (English literature, U. of Oldenburg, Germany), Leppanen (English, U. of Jyvaskyla, Finland) and nine co-authors contributed to the book. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ingrid Hotz-Davies is professor for English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Tubingen, Germany. She has worked and studied in Germany and Canada and is the author and co-editor of a number of books ranging from studies on the effect of censorship on writing to explorations of women's religious verse and, with Anton Kirchhofer, a collection on psychoanalysis as cultural material (Psychoanalytic-ism, 2000). She has published essays on a variety of topics, mostly in the field of gender studies, and is currently interested in what may be termed positionality - phenomena such as shame or eccentricity - and literary expression. Anton Kirchhofer is professor of English Literature at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. He studied in Berlin, Dublin and Pittsburgh and received his PhD from the University of Munich with a study on sexual knowledge in seventeenth and eighteenth-century novels. He obtained his postdoctoral degree with a study on critical discourse and the nineteenth-century periodical market. In these as in his published essays, his interest has been in the location of literary, critical and theoretical discourse in an evolving public sphere, and, more recently, in the role of literature in the formation of a secular self-perception of the 'West'. He is also one of the founding contributors of the website www.pierre-marteau.com. Sirpa Leppanen is Professor of English in the Department of Languages, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Her research areas include discourse analysis, multilingualism, and language and gender. She is currently working on multilingual blogging, and has published on language hybridity in various new media contexts, and gender and sexuality in fan fiction. She directs a research project on the spread of English within Finnish society which investigates the forms, functions and meanings of English taken up by Finns in a range of societal and cultural domains (for more information, see, www.jyu.fi/varieng).