By the first decade of the new millennium, evidence was mounting that the ‘high theory’ of ideology critique had played itself out as literary studies’ governing paradigm [Eagleton 2003] [Sedgwick 2003] [Latour 2004] [McDonald 2006] [Felski 2008] . [1] The energy and sense of liberation that had propelled successive waves of structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, new-historicist, and queer theory in the academy seemed to have reached a point of diminishing returns. Once revolutionary modes of analysis had ossified into rote posturing, with talk of radical revisioning oddly transmuted into received wisdom. This sense of a discipline in stasis was not only intellectual but also institutional — existential even. Universities’ political paymasters and research-funding bodies have increasingly insisted that disciplines demonstrate their vocational utility and real-world ‘impact’. Undergraduates, voting with their feet, indirectly registered the same message via declining enrolments, while graduate students — surveying a parlous academic job market — opted for other, presumably safer, careers [Gitelman 2020, 378–79] [Zhang 2022].[2] This already precarious disciplinary status quo was then massively destabilized by the COVID-19 pandemic’s shock to higher-education systems worldwide as revenue from international students collapsed in the face of travel bans and local lockdowns. In a discipline long prone to gloomy prognostications about its future, English scholars of even a more optimistic cast had to admit, by 2020, that the doomsayers really did have a point (Endgame, 2020).

Against this post-millennial background, engagement with the digital world seemed a logical pivot for the humanities, given information and communication technologies’ wholesale transformation of all aspects of contemporary western life since mainstreaming of the internet in the early 1990s. For literary studies in particular though, this turn to the digital came freighted with heavy baggage. Mid-1990s ‘death of the book’ discourse had pitted an all-conquering ‘electronic literature’ (eLit) against an ostensibly obsolete print medium, and had left many literary humanists with an active distaste for digital triumphalism [Kirschenbaum and Werner 2014, 406–7]. Strategic errors made by digital boosters in positing the digital as implacable rival and inevitable successor to print had served to polarize debate and made it harder to adopt middle-ground positions. As it transpired, eBooks and the printed codex negotiated an uneasy marketplace modus vivendi, but traditional literary scholars and former eLit enthusiasts were slower to do likewise. The rise of Digital Humanities (DH) discourse from around 2005 threatened a repeat of 1990s hostilities, this time with adherents of quantitative ‘distant reading’ at loggerheads with advocates of traditional hermeneutic close reading, who accused their adversaries of not reading at all [Eve 2019, 3–4] [Gitelman 2020, 372].

I have no intention here of buying into such stale, polarized, and unproductive debates. Indeed, superseding them is the starting point for the present discussion. In spite of the self-presentation of both eLit advocates and DH-ers as radical agents of change, their reconfigurations of the literary studies discipline have, if anything, not gone far enough. Both approaches remain essentially text-centric, differing principally on whether a niche group of very recent texts is painstakingly interpreted, or a large corpus of often obscure historical texts is digitally skimmed. Broader questions of how digital technologies might reconfigure academe’s now century-old literary studies project by looking beyond the text to an encompassing socio-economic reality remain largely unasked.

At the outset of the present discussion, some definitional clarification seems in order. In talking about ‘digital literary studies’ I denote principally literary works, deploying whatever medium, created since the late decades of the twentieth century. These have been produced, circulated, and consumed in the context of a digital literary sphere (however much the parameters of that sphere have expanded and its agents have multiplied over subsequent decades). But, by extension, much of the following argument about practising a ‘literary media studies’ is also relevant to analyzing literature produced in earlier, pre-digital eras, with due allowance being made for the varying medial environments and socio-economic contexts of specific periods and geographical locations. It is a broadly sociological, media-aware disposition I am advocating, not one with strict chronological cut-off points.

Currently, our intellectual schemas for making sense of the digital paradigm’s epochal impact on literary culture remain inadequate. Digital literary studies continues to miss the larger significance of digital technologies for contemporary literary culture because it takes either too micro or too macro a perspective. On one hand, studies of eLit have existed since the late 1980s, and focus on close-reading individual born-digital texts, usually of an avant-garde nature with at best coterie audiences. On the other hand, the last decade and a half has seen the efflorescence of DH approaches which machine-read extensive historical literary corpora to gauge large-scale statistical trends in genre, authorship, and nationality. However much their chronological frame differs, the guiding methodology remains at some level hermeneutic. Thus, DH scholar Alan Liu may be correct in his claim that “the contrast between the practices of close reading and the digital humanities is so stark that it is changing the very nature of the ground being fought over: the text” [Liu 2012, 494]. Yet, text-centrism of either stripe still mostly disregards the material world beyond the text itself: the agents of production, circulation, and consumption; the commercial context of the book trade; and the legal, political, and cultural policy frameworks that impinge upon or facilitate the flow of texts.[3] While often exemplary research about this intermediate space does exist (see below), it is currently scant and scattered, too often existing as a corrective to the main currents of eLit or DH research rather than, as should be the case, constituting the starting point for an overarching reorientation of the literature-media interface around sociological concerns. We are thus left, in an era of rapid book-world changes, with a troublingly partial understanding of how digital technologies are transforming the very institutionality of contemporary, mainstream literature.

To resolve this impasse, we urgently require what John Frow, discussing the future of literary sociology, terms a ‘mid-level concept’ (2013, [2010]) — namely, an analytical framework straddling, on one hand, innumerable individual literary texts and, on the other, the unwieldy abstraction that is ‘literature’ [Frow 2013, 227]. Literary studies has attempted, over its roughly century-long institutional history, to fill this ‘mid-level’ space with various organizing schema: periodization; genre categories; and diachronic accounts of national literatures [Frow 2013, 221, 227]. But these too remain near-exclusively text-centric. The why and how of literature’s arrival on the scholar’s desk for painstaking close-reading are factored out of analysis, and the text’s relationship to an abstractly configured form of identity politics has, in recent decades, dominated proceedings. The still too-often hazy technological and institutional apparatus that moves a given book into the scholarly ambit and makes it available for close-reading I here dub the ‘meso’ space.

I borrow this terminology from the field of economics where scholars since the 1980s have also proposed a mid-level category to bridge that discipline’s traditional bifurcation into microeconomic and macroeconomic frames [Dopfer et al. 2004]. The aim of such renegade economists is to capture those political-economic forces governing the space between individual economic actors and the broader structures within which they operate. Largely in parallel, a conceptually cognate ‘new institutionalism’ has, since the early 1990s, also emerged within the discipline of sociology [Powell and DiMaggio 1991] [Thornton 2012]. It has a similar interest in ‘mid-level’ or ‘meso’ intermediaries that shape cultural phenomenon (for example, commercial organizations, public-sector entities, regulatory frameworks, social networks) and which exhibit a strong degree of self-perpetuating autonomy. Such an institutional focus helps integrate the abstract totalities of ‘society’ or ‘the economy’ at one extreme and the empirical specificity of atomized individual choices at the other.[4] The approach also evinces a refreshing self-consciousness that the level of reference chosen for analysis profoundly influences the research questions formulated, the types of evidence sought, and the resulting conclusions [Thornton 2012, 14].

By analogy, in the literary studies context, the various institutions of authorship, publishing, retailing, reviewing, and readership provide compelling ‘mid-level’ analytical frames for compiling thick descriptions of precisely how digital media are fundamentally reconceptualizing literary culture.[5] The attractive relativism of the meso approach avoids, in this context, both the sweeping technological determinism of medium theory and the futile insularity of individual case-studies unmoored to larger theoretical schema. Vitally, the new institutionalism illuminates that literary entities are not mere externalities of an aesthetically autonomous literary culture; they are constitutive of it in that they profoundly influence what achieves recognition as ‘literature’. Literary studies’ long preoccupation with the linguistic minutiae of the textual artefact thus needs supplementing with sociological awareness of the material world beyond the text (in the word’s dual technological and economic senses), without pitting the two perspectives against each other or subordinating one to serve as mere illustration of the other’s explanatory paradigms. The way out of literary studies’ currently troubled, defensive pass as outlined at this article’s opening is thus multi-step: firstly, to reconceive the discipline in cultural-sociological terms. Secondly, to investigate how the current wave of accelerating digitization is changing that sociological context. And thirdly – as I sketch in this article’s final section – to use the opportunity provided by these contextual changes to rethink literary studies in far-reaching ways: its objects of study; institutional settings; analytic methods; potential publics; and pedagogical practices.

Before diving into such subtopics and appropriate methodologies for exploring the digital literary studies meso space, it is instructive first to provide a fuller picture of the current state of play regarding both eLit and DH. Specifically, it is enlightening to examine how these fields may be currently shifting or even, tentatively, converging. DH has emerged as a prime area of research renewal and public interest in the humanities in the wake of high theory [Burdick et al. 2012] [Gold 2012] [Terras 2013] [Jones 2014] [Gold and Klein 2016] [Gold and Klein 2019] [Crompton 2016] [Eve 2022]. The field builds upon mid-twentieth-century work in stand-alone humanities computing, but reorients it for the networked and Web 2.0 environments comprising the core of contemporary media and communications. It makes explicit the humanities’ continuing relevance for twenty-first-century culture and society, rejecting inherited notions of a qualitatively-oriented humanities as epistemologically opposed to quantitative computing technologies [Liu 2012, 502]. Refreshingly, DH also moves humanistic methods away from critique as the end-point of analysis towards the building of research tools usable by others, including the general public [Jones 2014, 10] [Battershill and Ross 2022, 172–73].

Literary studies has long been at the forefront of DH initiatives, with digital literary studies representing one of its most fertile subfields [Siemens 2007] [Hammond 2016]. Partly this is due to literary studies’ long history with computing technologies dating back to the 1960s mainframe era (bibliographic textual editing, concordances, stylometry, and author attribution). Partly also it is because literary studies is among the most textual and word-based of humanities disciplines and therefore a natural match for logocentric computing technologies [Drucker 2009] [Kirschenbaum 2012]. While digital literary studies constitutes a broad church, the dominant strand involves data-mining and visualizing of vast corpora of digitized print works from, predominantly, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are used to highlight trends by author, date, nationality, genre, or keyword [Moretti 2005] [Moretti 2013] [Underwood 2013] [Underwood 2019] [Jockers 2013] [Bode 2014] [Jones 2014].

Largely in parallel with these developments, since the late 1980s information and communication technologies have disturbed literary studies’ default assumptions by demonstrating that the printed codex is not literature’s sole and inevitable platform. Scholars of eLit have investigated how network structures such as hypertext facilitate multilinear narratives, reconfiguring relationships between author, text, and reader, as well as reconceptualizing texts as mutable and evolving — -‘processural’ in Astrid Ensslin’s phrasing [Ensslin 2007, 34] [Bolter 2001] [Hayles 2002] [Hayles 2008] [Landow 2006] [Tabbi 2017] [Rettberg 2018]. Conversely, such research has rendered newly visible the linear logic and particular affordances of the print medium through a salutary process of defamiliarization [Hayles 2002] [Hayles 2013] [Emerson 2014].

While both digital creative works and computer-powered research tools have made their presence felt in contemporary literary studies, the two fields have tended to operate in parallel. As Martin Paul Eve differentiates, “to read digital or electronic literature closely…is not the same as close reading literature, digitally” [Eve 2019, 10]. Scholars of born-digital works largely congregate under the banner of the international Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and produce belletristic, frequently fine arts-inflected, close-readings of experimental digital works, almost all of which have readerships largely confined to the community of their creation. Whereas scholars deploying digital tools to perform quantitative analyses of large historical corpora tend to congregate variously at Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations-sponsored meets or the US-dominated Modern Language Association’s Digital Humanities special interest group, and to publish in journals such as Cultural Analytics.[6] Leading terrestrial sites of this second, principally quantitative arm of digital literary studies research — such as the Stanford Literary Lab (formerly led by Franco Moretti) and McGill University’s .txtLAB (directed by Andrew Piper) — are mostly North American-based and, for reasons of US copyright, confine their research to pre-twentieth-century literary history [Jockers 2013] [Da 2019] [Eve 2022]. This leaves DH scholars with surprisingly little to say about the structures through which contemporary creative literary works circulate. While the ELO is more international in its membership, with significant nodes in Scandinavia as well as North America, it has the opposite problem: its preferred procedure of close-reading highly contemporary works is plagued by hardware and software obsolescence. This results in a discipline forever trying to shore up its scholarly memory [Montfort 2004]. These twin challenges leave the impact of the digital realm on contemporary, mainstream literary cultures chronically under-examined.[7]

While this sketch of the digital literary research landscape is accurate in its generalities, there are promising recent signs that both eLit and DH scholars are starting to acknowledge the missing ‘meso’ level. Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture (2021) undertakes quantitatively-informed analysis of how ‘minority authors’ have been consistently marginalized in the historical workings of the ‘U.S. literary field’ [So 2021, 2,3]. But he nevertheless introduces his book with an overview of accelerating conglomeration among US trade publishers over the second half of the twentieth century. It is a welcome DH avowal that “the economics of American literature — production, reception, and recognition” emphatically matter [So 2021, 5, 7–11]. By looking outside of the text and observing how digitization transformed the entire book production and retailing industries via word-processing software and point-of-sale stock-monitoring technologies, So makes a vital connection between the material and institutional contexts in which literature was produced and the digital programs with which we might parse it. The digital ceases to be a neutral tool which we apply to texts ex post facto, but a cultural force with which book industry participants were wrestling and which authors were sometimes explicitly addressing in their work [Kirschenbaum 2016].

A further green shoot appearing in the previously barren meso space is the recent explicit rebadging of eLit scholarship as a form of DH. There are precedents for such a maneuver, such as Scott Rettberg’s “Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities” chapter for Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth’s discipline-defining anthology A New Companion to Digital Humanities (2016). Nevertheless, in practice, most ELO adherents have tended to hold themselves somewhat aloof from post-millennial DH developments, pointedly insisting that their own academic project dates from at least the 1980s. But digital literary studies modes of affiliation are perceptibly now in flux. Dene Grigar, former President of the ELO, co-edited the volume Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices (2021) which proclaims unambiguously that “electronic literature is digital humanities” [Grigar 2021, 3]. Her echo of the title of Rettberg’s article — “one of the inspirations for this book” — underlines eLit’s belated surrender to the rhetorical and institutional pull of the more modish label [Grigar 2021, 3]. Taken together, works by the likes of So, Rettberg, and Grigar suggest that previously operative binaries between eLit and DH (contemporary versus historical; qualitative versus quantitative; creative versus analytical) are losing their valency. Their synthesis prompts the enticing question of how much the contours of the digital literary landscape might shift further still.

The lingering lacuna in current conceptualizations of digital literary studies becomes especially apparent when we zoom out to consider the technological, institutional, economic, and social changes underway since the early 1990s adoption of the Internet across western societies. Indisputably, the landscape of contemporary mainstream literature has been transformed. The gatekeeping authority of trade publishers has been partially usurped by self-publishing and crowd-funded publishing initiatives via which anyone may anoint themselves an author. Circulation of literary works and venues for book discussion have been similarly transformed by the rise of born-digital periodicals, internet retailing, social-media book promotion, and online writers’ festivals. Thirdly, consumption of literary culture has been revolutionized by traditionally passive, silent, and anonymous readers using interactive technologies to network in online book clubs and to recast themselves as amateur literary critics via online book review and ratings platforms. Each wave of social-media has been co-opted in turn by a subsector of bookish users to facilitate digital book talk, whether via litblogs, bookTube, bookstagram or, most recently, bookTok. Reader becomes reviewer and, more problematically, de facto publicist and content producer. This last point underlines digital technology’s greatest disruption of codex-based literary culture: how the previously distinct roles of producer, disseminator, and consumer have become impossibly blurred. As various functions in book historian Robert Darnton’s famous ‘Communications Circuit’ are elided, single agents take on multiple, combined roles [Murray 2013].

These changes have not, of course, passed un-noticed by academe. Scholars drawn from book history and media archaeology (Matthew Kirschenbaum, Lisa Gitelman, Martin Paul Eve), communication and cultural studies (Ted Striphas) and cultural sociology (J. B. Thompson, Laura J. Miller) have analyzed the significance of the contemporary book world’s pervasive digitization for their respective disciplines. While several of these scholars have backgrounds in literary studies, they nevertheless keep in view the material specificity of the book object, so often rendered a transparent and passive substrate by traditional formalist close-reading approaches. Because of this extra-textual awareness, their works explore the effect of digitization on book culture without the ominous 1990s sense of the entire book format being under threat. For those scholars in the group trained in sociology or communication on the other hand, the pre-eminence of the book as a media format was never an article of faith. Thus, the rise of other media formats signals not ignominious demotion of the book but merely the reorganization of an always-evolving informational ecosystem. The book – let alone the text — is never considered self-sufficient; it is, rather, the locus at which multiple commercial, regulatory, social, and cultural forces converge. To understand the book in the current era is inevitably to be redirected outwards to these larger contexts. It is this invaluable sociological perspective that such scholars bring to contemporary understandings of the book.

Work undertaken to date in this meso zone should be applauded for its willingness to examine digital technologies’ impact on the contemporary literary world. It also, at points, shades into the more DH arm of digital literary studies (for example in So’s recent book or the work of Martin Paul Eve). But here again the conception of the digital’s role appears to be primarily quantitative: harnessing the enumerative power and analytical scale of digital data to ask new ask questions about how Bourdieu’s literary field functions. Proponents of more textually-oriented, quantitative ‘cultural analytics’ approaches, such as Piper, are careful to pre-empt objections from those schooled in literary critique by stating that distant reading is not (pace Moretti) a substitute for close-reading, but rather a filtering tool and complement for detailed textual analysis [Piper 2015, 67]. In the view of such self-styled academic bridge-builders, the two methods represent ‘commensurable’ approaches [Long and So 2016, 237] [Eve 2019, 3–4]. Yet such work has been less ready to ask qualitative questions of the digital paradigm itself, specifically, how the rise of digitization affects the inter-relationship of traditional agents in the literary field. As a result, the digital tends to feature as transcendent — a neutral, external tool invoked to aid analysis but not itself complicit in the economic or sociological framing of the object of study. Where the textual corpus chosen is largely historical, this factoring out of the digital’s agentic role may be defensible, though it occurs also in contemporary-focused work. For example, Laura B. McGrath, in a study of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century book world, has illuminatingly deployed quantitative DH methods to reveal how US publishers overwhelmingly use ‘comparable title’ data from white authors when estimating likely sales for manuscripts under consideration, to the detriment of writers of color [McGrath 2019]. Yet, her analysis is more an ex-post-facto study of the top 500 titles used for ‘comping’ by the current book industry than of the impact of rapid and ongoing datafication on the industry itself. The problem, she implies, lies more with the composition of the specific corpus of comp titles chosen than with the act of ‘data-driven acquisitions’ per se [McGrath 2019]. Accordingly, the digital still functions primarily as a neutral aid for scholarly examination, rather than featuring as itself the object of critical study.

Despite much evidence of vibrancy in the digital literary studies space, mainstream literary studies has been predominantly silent about the impact of the digital within the contemporary book world.[8] US scholar Jim Collins (a Notre Dame professor with, significantly, joint appointments in Film and Television as well as English) memorably pinpoints this omission. In a 2013 interview, Collins spoke of his frustration at not being about to pose the kinds of production- and consumption-oriented questions in his English classes that he habitually would in his media studies courses:

To remedy this anomalous situation, Collins proposed what he dubs “literary cultural studies” [De Bruyn 2013, 197]. This, like cultural studies, would take issues of technological, institutional, economic, and social context seriously. Text and context would be held in dynamic relationship, posited as mutually constitutive, without superimposing the epistemological claims of one discipline on the other [Thumala 2021, 103]. It can thereby avoid the “sociological absolutism” that has bedeviled many previous parleys between the literary studies and sociology disciplines, in which literature is allotted the thankless task of ‘proving’ sociological precepts [Frow 2013, 219] [English 2010, xii–xiii]. Discernible behind Collins’s remarks is du Gay et al.’s famous ‘Circuit of Culture’ model from their 1997 book about the Sony Walkman. In this widely-influential cultural studies diagram, the textual representation of the object remains important for elucidating meaning, but it is contextualized against a much broader background incorporating producer motives, audience behaviors, modes of social-identity facilitation, and forms of regulation. The effect is a 360-degree perspective on the life of a cultural object.

The phrase ‘literary cultural studies’ may appear, at first glance, an oxymoron. Cultural studies, in its British and Australian strains, grew of course out of a revolt against the exclusive study of a highly limited historical canon of English literature. To the extent that cultural studies has ever been interested in analyzing books, it is usually only those works so debased and disparaged in traditional literary studies as to have been rendered symbolically ‘unclean’: pulps; romances; horror; westerns; comics etc. What is radical and refreshing about Collins’s brand of ‘literary cultural studies’ is that it brings the sociological gaze of cultural studies to analyze afresh literary studies’ original object of study: literature. More than this, Collins and his ilk eschew the knee-jerk relativism of cultural studies orthodoxy to parse the concept of ‘literariness’ itself. Here considerations of aesthetic value are not ruled out of bounds at the outset but are instead reconfigured as sociologically brokered: by analyzing, say, the disputes of amateur lit-bloggers, paid book reviewers, and literary academics around a single work we are watching aesthetic evaluation being hammered out in real time by agents wielding differing degrees of economic, institutional, and social capital.

The direct upshot of Collins’s frustration with the prevailing bifurcation of literary and media studies paradigms was his path-breaking monograph Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (2010). But the broader project of building a ‘literary cultural studies’ or — in my preferred formulation — ‘literary media studies’ for the digital remains unrealized. This is the ‘meso’ level of digital literary studies alluded to in my title. A meso-level digital literary studies must borrow from cultural sociology’s new institutionalist mindset to account for the influence of contemporary technological, institutional, economic, legal, and social factors which intervene between individual texts and the totalizing abstraction of ‘Literature’. It should take the coexistence and interpenetration of print and digital domains as its intellectual ground and closely analyze the complex flows of content between them. Doing so gives us tools to understand why the ‘literary’ not only continues to exist in a digitally-dominated mediascape (contrary to 1990s predictions), but how users deploy digital media to cultivate specifically literary modes of self-presentation: the virtual Goodreads ‘bookshelf’; the artfully curated bookstagram feed; the dark-academia-inflected BookTok persona.

How did we arrive at the point that sociological understandings lie outside mainstream literary studies’ order of business? The various institutional, epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical choices made from the late decades of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century in establishing English literature as an academic specialism have cast long shadows. More particularly, for present purposes, they have inhibited the current discipline’s conceptual repertoire when attempting to analyze contemporary literary works. Before proposing, in this article’s final section, how literary studies might productively open itself up to contemporary digital developments, it is first necessary to trace here key contours of the original ‘Eng. Lit.’ project. My purpose in doing so is to examine both the legacy of those choices and to discern alternative paths not (yet) taken. Decisions made while inventing the new discipline were phenomenally successful in ensuring literary studies’ dominance within humanities divisions during the mid to late twentieth century [Hunter 1988] [Graff 2007] [English 2012] [Doyle 2014]. But, by the twenty-first century, many of these in-built assumptions have grown more hobbling than enabling, and demand re-examining to assess their continued utility.

As we enter a third decade of ‘postcritique’ literary studies, it is clear that waiting the digital out is not an option. Conceptions of a print culture posited in steadfast opposition to the digital have been disproven by the consumer trends of the last 25 years and were, in any case, always ontologically suspect. Media historians have long disputed neatly successionist views of a newer communication technology wholesale replacing an earlier medium. The intellectual challenge — and payoff – instead lies in observing different mediums’ patterns of complex interdependence, mutual cannibalization, and unexpected revivification. Literary studies’ post-millennial pivot towards the digital has been welcome in providing our discipline with justification for its continued twenty-first-century relevance. However, the ways in which digital literary studies is currently configured have exposed a hollow middle between, at one extreme, micro-scale studies of contemporary born-digital works that are often closer to fine arts practice, are accessed by miniscule publics, and are likely to become technologically obsolete within a decade and, at the other, macro-oriented studies of pre-1923 literary history (now almost a century in the past). Neither of these domains provides a viable roadmap for a literary studies discipline seeking to engage meaningfully with the mainstream of contemporary culture. It is not so much that embrace of the digital has been a mistake for literary studies but that the embrace has been awkwardly set up. Digital technologies not only provide new platforms for existing texts, they normalize new modes for producing texts, radically expand networks for circulating them, and greatly empower readers who seize the opportunity to become textual producers in turn. Digital sociology offers the necessary tools to broaden our analytic gaze to capture this sense of a digital literary sphere in dynamic flux.

To return in closing to the Jim Collins interview mentioned earlier, he speaks of the urgency of the literary academy looking up from its texts and its now-familiar ideological constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality to engage fully with the materiality of contemporary literary culture: “for me to teach contemporary fiction I should now talk to my students about how they come to it, how it circulates, what’s going on outside as well as inside the classroom” [Collins 2010, 197]. Such an expansive mindset allows literary academe to converse with communities of paraliterary enthusiasts with whom we have so far had little traffic: the burgeoning and vociferous audiences for writers’ festivals; book clubs; online reviewing; and digitally-hosted book talk in general. Many of these groups have for some decades turned away from academic literary critics as taste arbiters, alienated by the arcane terminology and suspicious reading protocols they encountered in undergraduate curricula or endured in diluted versions as high-schoolers. We cannot afford to pass up this opportunity to make common cause with a sizable body of literary enthusiasts among the broader public, not with literary studies buffeted by falling enrolments, governments’ vocational agenda, and insecure patterns of academic employment. Demotic brands of literary criticism never went away; we just lacked the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical tools (and yes, perhaps, the willingness) to engage with them. With the advent of the digital literary sphere, these extra-academic literary discussions are better archived, more discoverable, and more socially porous than ever before. We are thus faced with the choice Rita Felski identifies in the epigraph to this article: to retreat in the face of digital culture and to define literariness in ever-more circumscribed and aesthetically exclusive ways. Or, to embrace what the digital literary sphere has to offer our discipline: new things to study; new ways to talk about them; and – crucially – new audiences who may well want to hear what we have to say about how contemporary literary culture actually functions.