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We the Platform
How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature
Series: Literature Now
Brief Description
Web 2.0 gave us the online world as we know it today. Popularised in 2004, it redefined the internet as social, a platform for self-expression and data gathering. The ensuing proliferation of user-generated content such as social media posts, fan fiction, self-published novels, and Instagram poetry...
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We the Platform
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We the Platform is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing.
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Description
Web 2.0 gave us the online world as we know it today. Popularised in 2004, it redefined the internet as social, a platform for self-expression and data gathering. The ensuing proliferation of user-generated content such as social media posts, fan fiction, self-published novels, and Instagram poetry has spurred a host of anxieties about the end of literature. Yet contemporary literary fiction is deeply indebted to the folk forms that Web 2.0 cultivated, even when it is sharply critical of the platform business models behind them.
We the Platform is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognised forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival.
Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler's challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman's collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, this book shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now.
Series: Literature Now
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Poetry in General
In the second half of the twentieth century, poetry leapt out of books and became an interdisciplinary public form. Poetry entered bureaucratic systems of organisation like index card catalogues; it pushed the boundaries of privately owned public parks. Keegan Cook Finberg argues that poetry became an increasingly capacious force during this period because it could speak directly to the degradation...Paperback$12400Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
Poetry After Barbarism
Against a backdrop of xenophobic and ethnonationalist fantasies of linguistic purity, Poetry After Barbarism uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Departing from the national and global paradigms that dominate literary history, Jennifer Scappettone traces the aesthetic and geopolitical resonance of “xenoglossic” poetics: poetry composed in the space of contestation between national languages, concretising dreams of...Paperback$7599Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Writing Backwards
Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Midcentury writers tended to set their works in their own moment, but for the last several decades critical acclaim and attention have fixated on historical fiction. This shift is particularly dramatic for writers of colour. Even as the literary canon has become more diverse, cultural institutions have celebrated Black, Asian American, Latinx, and...Paperback$6699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Big Fiction
In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry,...Paperback$5699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Bookishness
Twenty-first-century culture is obsessed with books. In a time when many voices have joined to predict the death of print, books continue to resurface in new and unexpected ways. From the proliferation of "shelfies" to Jane Austen–themed leggings and from decorative pillows printed with beloved book covers to bookwork sculptures exhibited in prestigious collections, books are everywhere and are not...Paperback$5699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
American Literature's War on Crime
While the United States was building the world's largest prison system, Americans were reading crime novels. What did it mean to read crime fiction in a "tough-on-crime" era? How were fictional stories about crime linked to cultural narratives about criminality, class, and race? What did novels have to do with the making of mass imprisonment in America? Theodore Martin offers...Paperback$12100Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
We the Platform
Web 2.0 gave us the online world as we know it today. Popularised in 2004, it redefined the internet as social, a platform for self-expression and data gathering. The ensuing proliferation of user-generated content such as social media posts, fan fiction, self-published novels, and Instagram poetry has spurred a host of anxieties about the end of literature. Yet contemporary literary...Paperback$6699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780231219709
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 30 June 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Illustration: 11 b&w illustrations
Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Width: 140.0mm
Height: 216.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 304
About the Author
Aarthi Vadde is E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (Columbia, 2016) and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2024), among other books. She is the president of the Society for Novel Studies (2025–27) and cofounder of its podcast Novel Dialogue.
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