literature and technology essay

Literature and Technology

This collection of essays uses recent work on literature and science to establish new ways of relating literature and language theory to writings about technology (as distinguished from science). The interdisciplinary character of these essays is further enriched by drawing upon contemporary studies of the philosophy and history of technology, which provide the context for the first essay (Mitcham and Casey). Subsequent essays examine technology from many points of view―how technology shapes texts and contexts, as well as how writers shape perspectives on technology. The essays examine texts as diverse as seventeenth-century science and twentieth-century children's literature and spy fiction. Major authors investigated include Chaucer, Blake, Romains, Pynchon, and Prigogine.

Individual essays consider: Chaucer's use of mapmaking as a coercive technology (Tomasch), the Renaissance fascination with mechanical contrivances and their depiction (Knoespel), the contexts within which Boyle and his successors described the air pump (Markley), Blake's manifold interests in the technology of printing (Greenberg), Romains's development of a philosophy of poetry appropriate to early twentieth-century technology in Paris (Williams), gender issues in children's literature about machines (Lee), technology in the modern spy novel (Slade), Thomas Pynchon's mixed feelings about technology and its value (Schachterle), and the relations between postmodern fiction and the technology of thermodynamics, as developed by Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine (Porush).

The editors of Literature and Technology have been active in the formation and direction of the Society for Literature and Science. In their introduction to this collection, they consider what characterizes literature and technology as a new and fertile field for interdisciplinary study. This volume concludes with selected bibliographies of basic references in the philosophy of technology and of works devoted to the examination of the relationships between literature and technology.

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• Eleonora Lima Eleonora Lima School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1097
• Published online: 25 March 2021

The history of literature has always been influenced by technological progress, as a transformative cultural power—threatening destruction or promising a luminous future—as a theme inspiring new narrative forms and plots, or as a force influencing the way authors conceive textuality and perform their creative work. The entanglement between literary and technological inventions is even recorded in the etymology of the word, which comes from the Greek “techne,” a term referring to arts as well as crafts. The way writers conceive this relationship, however, varies greatly: although some consider the work of technicians to be congenial to artistic creation, as they both demonstrate human creativity and ingenuity, others believe technology to be a dehumanizing and unnatural force, not only alien to literature but in competition with its own ethos. Therefore, depending on their position, the writer comes to embody the mythical figure of Prometheus, the first technician and defiant creator, or that of Orpheus, symbolizing the marriage between poetry and nature compared to any artificial creation. However, the opposition between nature and technology, with literature positioning itself either in one realm or the other, is only one of many possible critical perspectives. Indeed, when moving beyond the idea of technology as merely a kind of artifact, the affinities between texts and machines clearly emerge. A mutual relation connects technology and textuality, and this has to do with the complex nature of material and cultural objects, each shaped by social use, aesthetic norms, and power structures. This bond between discursivity and materiality is impossible to disentangle, as is the contextual relationship between literature and technology: Texts prescribe meanings to machines just as much as the latter shape their textuality. To recognize literature and technology as two different systems of meanings and sets of practices which are nevertheless always in conversation with each other is also to understand literature as technology. This stance has nothing to do with the likeness of the poet and the technician as creative minds but rather with the idea of literary texts functioning like technologies and, ultimately, offering a meta-reflexive analysis of their own textuality. According to this critical perspective, literature performatively enacts the changes in textuality brought about by technological progress, from the printing press to digital writing tools.

• technological determinism
• Victorian literature
• communication technologies
• information science
• discourse network
• media studies
• posthumanism

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The Impact of Technology on Literature

• Post author: Marie
• Post published: September 5, 2019
• Post category: Classroom Ideas / Classroom Management / Lesson Planning / Literature Programming
• Post comments: 42 Comments

After spending some time researching technology in the classroom and writing a couple of other posts on the subject, I started thinking specifically about the impact of technology on literature.

Certainly, technology has affected just about every aspect of our lives.  That especially rings true in educational circles.

But we can think of technology in literature in a different way.  Books have almost been perceived as the anti-technology tool.  They have been floating around nearly forever.  Okay, actually only a little over 600 years in the form we think of now.  But relatively speaking, that’s a pretty long time.

Table of Contents

What the “Experts” are Saying

With the advent of tablets, e-books, email, and computers in general, it may appear that books have lived out their usefulness.  In July, 1913, Thomas Edison said the following:

“Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools.  Scholars will be instructed through the eye.  It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture.  Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.”

To be fair, the quote was referencing movies, which were still quite new at the time.  And he was not entirely wrong. Motion pictures actually can teach us a vast number of different disciplines.  But fortunately for all of us, the rich experience of picking up a book and reading it did not get buried in the world of the motion picture.  Both the written word and film have managed to live a very rich life alongside of each other.

Mr. Edison was also largely responsible for implementing film in the classroom as early as 1910.  What a wonderful experience it would have been for the students at the time! There had really been nothing like it up to that point in history.  And he was absolutely right that film had the potential to communicate information in a better way than books could. People could actually watch things happen in real time.  It is that fact that caused him to believe that the written word would no longer be relevant in human life.

The Current Consensus

Recently, I was waiting for an appointment in a waiting room.  I was reading a book–the paper kind.  One of the men that worked in the office came out, turned towards me, and just stared for a bit before saying, “Wow, you are actually reading a physical book!  I didn’t think people did that anymore.”

That sentiment rings true for a lot of our society today.  Books have been replaced by tablets, phones, computers, and any other electronic device that you can put an app on.

But more than a few of us still exist that would rather hold a book than a tablet.  We would rather turn a page than scroll through.  And almost nothing beats the smell of a new book and the feeling of crisp, new, quality pages.

Sharing the Limelight

That being said, we can still find plenty of room to allow books and technology to share the stage.  Reading a book in a classroom full of kids makes all sorts of magic happen.  When you choose the books that kids love and tie in some of their favorite activities, you make history for them.  They will remember those lessons and what they read in those books for years to come.  And that is what makes technology in the literature world impactful and necessary.

So far, all of this has been written to say that there is an impact of technology on literature.  But what we have discussed so far is how technology has not impacted the popularity of books and literature in general.  What I would like to focus on now, is actually how technology has impacted and enhanced the world of books.

The Impact of Technology on Literature in the Movies

While I already alluded to this with the Thomas Edison quote, I didn’t express how this technology has actually benefited the reading of books.  We know that countless young people traditionally don’t love to read.  We also know that those same kids pretty much love to watch tv and play video games.  And that is where technology boosts those books.

I know that I have always loved to read.  But even with the constant book in my hand, there were times that I watched a movie and loved it so much that I just had to go buy and read the book.  And most of the time, I realized I loved the book even more.  There is so much more detail in most books over the movies that they represent.  And time is not a factor.  You can pick the book back up anytime.

The amount of immersion one feels when reading a book is not nearly as strong when watching the same title in movie form.  We are merely spectators, and when the 1 1/2 to 2 hours is over, so is that part of our world.  Once in a while, an incredible movie will be released that will break that stereotype.  But vastly more often, you become incredibly enmeshed with the characters of a book.  When you get to the end of the book, you can actually feel the loss of that relationship.  You can never get back that feeling of kinship you felt with certain characters or even the author, even upon re-reading the book. Thus in this way, watching the movie version can actually be an encouragement to go read the book, which has so much more material and life in it than a movie can produce.

The Impact of Technology on Literature in the Classroom

While movies can happen inside as well as outside of the classroom, there are so many other ways that technology impacts life in the classroom.  I will touch how it affects literature for now.

The impact of technology on literature has carried more benefits than drawbacks.  That is a good thing for teachers of all venues.

Technology has opened up a whole new world of materials for teachers to draw from.  Thirty years ago, there was an excellent library system but you had to know where to look to find what you wanted.  Or you needed to know somebody who knew how to obtain what you were looking for.  Now, there is almost no limit to what resources you can find online.  You are merely limited by the time it takes to search for whatever it is you are looking for.  Sometimes the search is lightning fast, other times it eludes us.

Ordering materials used to consist of shopping in town.  Or maybe shopping from a catalog, in which case, you needed to make sure you planned at least a couple of weeks ahead.  There was no such thing as one- or two-day shipping.

I remember as a young teenager needing some art supplies for my upcoming art class.  My mother took me to the art store, which was two towns away from where I lived.  Once we got there, we expected to find everything we needed.  We had no other options except for that store.  But, they did not have everything I needed.  And class was about to start.

So we explained to the man running the cash register (he was the owner/operator of the store) what we needed.  He got on the phone and started calling around to other stores outside of the area.  And he found what we needed.  But it took nearly a week to get the supplies in.  And then I had to wait for him to be ready for me to go pick it up.

Now we have Amazon.  And one- or two-day shipping.  And we feel like we just aren’t going to make it without our stuff if we have to wait much longer than that.

As teachers, we still have to prepare, sometimes weeks in advance.  Research still takes time, even though the world is at our fingertips.  And planning also takes time.  So does creating and experimenting until we get the result we desire.  But it is so. much. easier.

Contact with the Masters

We possess the ability to hear some of the greatest literary masters of all time.  We had access to much of that thirty years ago as well.  But we had to go to the library.  We searched the card catalog.  We looked for the right microfiche.  And when none of that helped us out, we asked the librarian, who somehow knew where everything was.  Now, it is generally a matter of pulling our phone out of our pocket and googling the person we want to hear from.

Online, we can find interviews in written, audio, and video form. Plus, the internet is already pretty organized for us.  As much as we sometimes hate on Google, they have truly done an amazing job of cataloging all of the information that is the internet.

We can work on a great literary work, such as The Hobbit.  And somewhere in that unit, we can actually pull up interviews that J.R.R. Tolkein did regarding his work.   It is as easy as pulling it up on Youtube, less than a minute.  This addition to classroom activities would be impossible thirty years ago, even though the interviews were done in the 1960’s.  It would have been too hard and too time consuming to find them, if possible at all.

Get Everyone Involved

There are several venues online for active communication and planning throughout your literature units.  Some great choices are making a blog and having your students each contribute posts, forums that you can share information, answer questions, read and see ideas from students, even play games.  You could use a forum to send students on a treasure hunt, or solve a mystery related to what they are reading.  So many options abound!

The main idea here is getting the kids involved in a way that makes them excited to be a part of the class.  Kids who are too shy to speak out in class often will like the idea of being able to post something in a group or forum.  They will be more comfortable because they know they will be able to think before they write (type), as opposed to feeling put on the spot to answer in the classroom.

And who knows?  Maybe by the end of the year, they WILL feel more comfortable sharing in class because they know their thoughts were appreciated and cultivated as they progressed through the year.

I could have talked about so many more things that technology contributes to the classroom.  And we didn’t even start the conversation about drawbacks to technology.  Although I think they are few and far between compared to the advantages.  But the points brought up make a pretty good start.

As always, I would love to hear how technology has improved (or hindered) your classroom.

In the meantime, to catch up on some of the other technology posts, click on the links below:

How to Take Advantage of Tech in the Classroom

How to Take Advantage of Tech in the Classroom II

Related posts:

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This post has 42 comments.

I love how much the internet allows us to find out about new books, old classics and also gives us a place to buy them. There were no book shops in my old town, so ordering online was essential.

Yes, Nyxinked, ordering online works better for me nowadays because I can find most things quicker online than taking the time to go to the store and find it, if it is even in stock!

The technology has it’s upsides and downsides. This is a great upside, that people who don’t have access to a book shop can easily read online, or order books online.

So true, Cristina!

Technology helps me as I find it easy to hold a kindle and I can order online.

Technology has been a big help nowadays. It really akes every single thing more easier.

My overhead unit broke for 2 months and it was missed so so so much, by me and the students. I couldn’t run power points, audio clips, or even put something up on the screen for students to see. When they came to repair it, we cheered. 🙂

I literally smiled at this because I know the joy of getting a favorite thing back after missing it. I bet that was a great week for all of you.

I love technology, but nothing beats the feeling of a real book. My kids prefer looking stuff up though, while I still have an encyclopedia set. 😉

I almost sold my encyclopedias a couple of years ago but one of my sons begged me not to. And although I use technology for lots of things, I still surround myself in real books. There is no online experience that beats reading a great physical book!

Interesting article. Technology has its positive and negative aspects. Thanks for this informative post. Enjoy your weekend!

You too, Candace!

I still prefer a book or the computer. I am able to enjoy it better

Me too, Tara! Nothing beats snuggling up and reading a great book (with a cover and pages)!

I think you have to walk a very fin line when it comes to technology. This is super helpful. Thanks so much for sharing this with all of us!

I enjoy reading books on Kindle. But nothing beats reading a physical book in your hands!

I’ll have to ask my DIY how technology has hindered her in the classroom. I’ve had kindles since they first came out but I’ve only read a couple of eBooks. I always buy physical books. There’s something magical about a story coming to life as I’m flipping the pages.

I love my Kindle and how technology makes books more accessible, however, nothing compares to the feel of a book and experiences of flipping each page.

Technology really has come so far. Things are so much different for my son today than they were for me many years ago.

I’m torn about this, because it has its advantages and disadvantages. Having said that I love reading a book, I like to touch it and smell it.

It is crazy that 10 years ago you need to buy multiple harry potter books, now you can read it on your mobile devices!

it is so weird. i wonder if there will come a time when a kid won’t have even picked up a paperback or hardbacked book. how sad is that. but i guess in a day of covid-19 lockdowns mobile technology can be very helpful for teachers and students.

I remember having to own a whole encyclopedia set, and having to go to various libraries just to get stuff done. Tech has its benefits!

Technology really does have a huge impact on a lot of things, thanks for sharing this information with us!

Well, like always, technology is a double-edged sword once put into use. We have to be very cautious with it.

Technology has many benefits to our existence. It is only up to us how to use it properly.

Technology enabled one to one correspondence between an author and a reader. This new way of communication is adding new dimensions to the literary fraternity. It is providing a healthy discussion about the reception and understanding literature in a better way among scholars, researchers and common readers.

Do agree..glad you shared such valuable information with us..great work though..this is so informative and useful blog post…

Technology has changed so many things, I remember those days, that we have to write on a slate/board with chalk, then write on books and load tons of books to study, they story has changed today, I personally prefer reading soft copies compared to hard copies, however, effective learning is still the old way in my own opinion.

This is really insightful. I used to use only digital books (which is helpful for small spaces). But I’ve begun purchasing hardcover book again. And then I can give them to friends.

my kids love using tablets and such for school and learing. it helps a lot.

More people now use e-readers and more digital platforms. Also, it’s easier now to sell books.

Teaching and school has majorly changed here in Belgium since the pandemic and some changes may get to be permanent 🙂

This is great article but i am more on Books. Thanks for sharing.

I was thinking along similar lines yesterday. My love of reading stems from childhood and my parents who would read from the row of books on the shelf every night. When I was able to read well enough, I had to read the same stories to my younger brother. As an adult, I am so hyperallergic to any dust or particles that books are a nightmare, even brand new ones. I find that I prefer ebooks on my laptop even though it’s not as portable as a book I can fit into my handbag.

For me the biggest difference between a book and a movie, is the emotions of the characters, their thoughts and feelings that are not always easily or well translated to a movie script.

I might be old school but I still prefer books that ebooks. Both can still co-exist in modern literature and the latter shouldn’t have to die.

It’s safe to say we saw this shift coming. I’m kind of in-between on the thoughts on how things are changing.

Internet has supported literature really well. Interesting topic. We can search for books, poems, stories, articles, blogs, scholarly documents and much more.

What a great article! I never thought I would see the day where books would become obsolete in schools!

Technology definitely has its ups and downs, but more “ups” in my opinion. However, I do still love to get the actual book to hold and to possibly meet the authors to sign one day.

Wow,technology has been of so much help in the society today.

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Essay: Literature and Technology

Every year, we use Short Story Month as an opportunity to dive deep into questions of craft. This year, we take a close look at how contemporary literature tackles technology. We discuss fiction that uses Instagram, selfies, text messages, and robots in order to help convey emotion, reflection, and meaning.

“So many futuristic tales ask this: where do we draw the line between ourselves and what we have created? If this is what it means to be a machine, what does it mean to be a person?”

The case could easily be made that literature and technology are opposites. Great literature is a celebration of our very humanity. It chronicles our subjectivity, our ugliness, our desires, and our fears. It is a record of critical thought and of lived experience. Technology on the other hand, is rote. It is comprised of mechanical parts, of code, of signals. It is pure functionality, devoid of thought.

No wonder we are so fascinated with it.

In fact, we’re obsessed. From Taylor S wif t videos to Black Mirror to the Bladerunner sequel—there’s a wealth of contemporary media that interrogates our relationship with technology. Fiction is no exception. In the slush pile alone, we’ve seen many stories in the form of emails, several pieces featuring robots, a lot of fiction about drones, and one very special story that (somehow) analyzed complex trauma through emojis.

Here, we examine the ways in which technology is incorporated in contemporary stories and novels as a mirror that casts a different light on our own experience and a foil that shows us the best and worst of ourselves. Whether it’s the simple use of a text message or an encounter with AI, the use of technology in fiction often provides characters with an opportunity for self-reflection.

<<   >>

I must admit that I’ve always found the selfie to be a strange and tragic form. In them, we look like bewildered creatures, staring into the lens, studying ourselves.

This conceit can be incredibly useful in fiction. It’s often very difficult to have a first-person narrator talk about themselves without it feeling contrived. Technology provides an easy solution to this problem. In Tom Perrotta’s recent novel Mrs. Fletcher , Eve, a middle-aged woman explores her own (sexual) identity after her only son leaves for college. In this passage, she examines the selfies she took after a new haircut:

They were really good—not just the haircut and the clothes, but the look on her face, and even the way she was standing with her hand on her hip, and her head canted at the perfect, self-possessed angle. Everything felt right and true, just the way she wanted it. There I am , she thought.

  Imagine this same scene with Eve looking in a mirror, and it feels more than a little contrived. This sort of (literal) self-reflection would be very hard to achieve without the help of the selfie—a form which asks us to study ourselves from all angles. In the final line, “There I am,” Eve is reaffirming her own identity through this image. The cover for the book itself features a drawing of a woman in bed, looking at her phone, the light from its screen illuminating half her face.

<<  >>

In “The Relive B ox” by T.C. Boyle , a man is obsessed with a technology that is even more addictive than TV: a box that, when activated, lets you relive your memories, but only as an observer. The protagonist can’t stop himself from going into the relive room and watching himself romance and lose his past loves: his punk college girlfriend who cheated on him; his ex-wife, who has left him alone to raise his fifteen-year-old daughter. He’s looking back at his old happiness, and also his mistakes. He offers endearingly funny commentary on his past appearances:

What I said then, unaware that my carefully sculpted pompadour was collapsing across my brow in something very much like a bowl cut (or worse— anathema —a Beatles shag), was “You want to dance?” My hair hung limp, my muscles were barely there, but I was young and reasonably good-looking, even excusing any bias.

The relive box becomes a true compulsion, causing the protagonist to ignore his life in the now : his sleep, his job, basic hygiene, even the care of his daughter. He admits: “ . . . I had to relive it. I couldn’t help myself. I just kept picking at it like a scab.” And, the thing is: he is not alone. He notices others in the office with the same zombie eyes: they share the compulsion to abandon the present for the past.

And, just like that, this imagined technology has turned a mirror on humanity and showed us ourselves in a less flattering light. Who doesn’t, sometimes, stew in nostalgia and regret? Who hasn’t thought that, if you analyze your mistakes hard enough, you can undo them? Ultimately, this story shows us that it’s the human tendency to dwell in the past—to regret our actions, to resent those of others—that can undo us.  

In “Demonman” by Julialicia Case , which won one of our recent Short Story Awards for New Writers, emojis are used to describe a trauma that runs deeper than language. “Demonman” is told from the perspective of an eleven-year-old girl whose sister is the most recent victim of a serial rapist. Her sister has stopped talking altogether so the girls communicate solely through texted emojis. This sounds trivial in summary, but the effect on the page is quite the opposite. (You really just have to read it ). The narrator calls the rapist Demonman: “My phone has an emoji of Demonman, with a round red face and eyes like pink fried eggs. His smile glints like a zipper, and beside him, the robot pretends he is fine.” So much menace is packed into this description of an animated monster: the smile sharp as a zipper, the terrified robot.

The sisters have whole conversations made up of images. It’s the unspeakable things behind them that give them weight:

I text Laura the water drop emoji, three drops, like rain, but going sideways. I text the fire emoji with the red sparks shooting upward. I text her a question mark, as in, what will help you? . . . It’s late when my phone buzzes. She’s texted the volcano, texted the roaring wave, texted a night sky with stars so cold I shiver as if their loneliness were my loneliness, too.

“Demonman” effectively shows us one of the worst sides of human nature: in it, technology is a language that conveys the aftermath of violence, the ways in which trauma can make its victims feel marooned by their fears.

In “Likes” by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum , a father tries to connect with his withholding twelve-year-old daughter by looking at her Instagram account. The 2016 election looms at the edges of this story. His daughter is undergoing physical therapy so that she can keep up with her ballet. It’s clear that she is having trouble connecting with her peers at school. The protagonist looks for clues into his daughter’s mentality in the pink-toned images on her Insta: a sunset; lips; a medium-rare hamburger; a pink Starbucks drink; a frosted cupcake.

When the distracted father gets in a wreck driving his daughter home from school, Instagram reveals her sense of betrayal: “New post: a bared collarbone with a seat-belt burn running diagonally across it. The welt shiny with ointment, and pink.”

It’s interesting that “Demonman” also uses a pink palette: after her rape, the narrator’s sister Laura will only eat pink foods: spaghetti with tomatoes, rare meat, borscht. These stories both consider their color palettes carefully, much as the daughter in “Likes” does for her Instagram feed. Teens and preteens are increasingly expressing themselves through visual media, and fiction is mimicking this language.

  <<   >>

Even our fictions about futuristic technologies reveal a desire to know what it is to be human.

The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce is a novel that is set in an alternate reality with a futuristic feel. The narrator, Jim Byrd, has an artificial heart, which he can monitor through an application on his iPhone. The system that controls his HeartNet can literally be hacked; a remote hacker could cause his heart to explode. Holograms begin popping up all over his small, southern town—and it’s very difficult to tell them from real people. It takes a long time for our narrator to realize that a greeter at the bank where he works is actually just a three-dimensional projection.

In a novel that is so much about what makes us human, this blurring of boundaries between people and machines illuminates our own fragility and the subjective nature of existence itself. So many futuristic tales ask this: where do we draw the line between ourselves and what we have created? If this is what it means to be a machine, what does it mean to be a person?

Another one of our favorite Masters Review stories, “Iron Boy Kills the Devil” by Sheldon Costa , has the markings of a futuristic landscape. Drones deliver all of the necessary supplies to the depressed, rural town where our protagonist lives. Not only that: our fourteen-year-old protagonist Iron Boy is convinced that he himself is a machine of his mother’s making.

After all, when your first love is leaving town, your dad is about to lose his job, and your brother is slipping away from you, this is the most convenient line of thought:

The best thing about being a machine: your feelings are just one big illusion. A trick composed of sensors and pressure plates, maybe some rudimentary chemical reactions. You might feel like your heart is breaking, but the truth is that whatever you have inside of you is mostly indestructible.

If only, Iron Boy. This passage reveals how plainly and painfully human Iron Boy is, and in so doing it tugs at the humanity in all of us. Now, when a machine can do that, I will begin to worry.

by Sadye Teiser

Winter Short Story Award 2nd Place: "A History That Brings Me to You" by Katie M. Flynn

Winter short story award 1st place: “drop zone summer” by nick fuller googins.

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Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century

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• Nina Engelhardt 5 &
• Julia Hoydis 6  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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• The original version of this chapter was revised. The correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_12

This introductory chapter situates the book in current discussions in the fields of literature and science studies and twenty-first-century fiction. It introduces the notion of ‘connectivities,’ understood to capture actual states as well as possibilities for connection, and distinguishes it from, respectively, the concepts of ‘two cultures’ and ‘networks’ to allow fresh and unburdened views on representations of science in contemporary fiction. Setting out the organisation of this volume in two main sections, the chapter explains the governing ideas of ‘human connectivities’ and ‘temporal connectivities’ and locates these in contemporary criticism, including conceptualisations of returns to realism and ethics, unbroken interest in the past and the future, and renegotiations of the traditionally speculative views of science fiction and its relations to mainstream literature.

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Introduction

Modes of Connection

Science and technology more than ever govern human lives. While it has become a commonplace observation that the twenty-first century is marked by scientific and technological change on an unprecedented scale, it remains a challenge to map the implications for contemporary fictional representations. The present volume tackles a specific part of this challenge, addressing scientific and literary innovations as well as continuities and returns. Twenty-first-century writing in the field of literature and science obviously stands in a long tradition of writers and scholars that “have reflected on, reimagined, and challenged the sciences for over two millennia” (Sielke 2015 , 12), and the topic of science and/in fiction shows no signs of decline as the third millennium progresses, neither in terms of artistic production nor as an area of critical enquiry. In contemporary drama, for example, science has been seen to become “the hottest topic in theatre today, so much so that it’s identifiable as a millennial phenomenon on the English-speaking stage” (Rocamora 2000 , 50). Likewise, there has been a wave of popular films about scientists over the last years, including screen works such as A Beautiful Mind (2001), Proof (2005), Ramanujan (2014), The Imitation Game (2014), A Theory of Everything (2014), The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), and Hidden Figures (2016). In prose fiction, the “science novel” (see Schaffeld 2016 ) has attracted significant attention and branched out into a variety of topical interests and genres, running the gamut from popular science, speculative fiction, and apocalyptic disaster narratives to new realist and historical novels, including ‘brain memoirs’ (see Tougaw 2017 , 2018 ) and ‘neuronovels’ (see Roth 2009 ), ‘cli-fi’ (see Johns-Putra 2016 ; Trexler 2015 ; Schneider-Mayerson 2017 ), and the field of ‘posthuman’ fiction, including, most recently, ‘AI narratives.’ Footnote 1 In addition, the impact of digitalisation across all media and genres and on twenty-first-century culture in general affects modes of artistic and knowledge production and reception.

If the representation of science in novels, films, plays, and poetry does not show any signs of decline, neither does the field of literature and science studies. Recent scholarly publications predominantly focus on a single genre and a single scientific discipline, as a look at books published in the first half of the year 2018 reveals: Rachel Crossland’s Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence , Nina Engelhardt’s Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics , John Fitch’s The Poetry of Knowledge and the ‘Two Cultures,’ Lianne Habinek’s The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience , Jenni Halpin’s Contemporary Physics Plays: Making Time to Know Responsibility , Andrea K. Henderson’s Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture , and Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender . Unlike these books, this volume does not focus on any one particular genre or branch of science (e.g. physics, biology, or mathematics), yet, it shares with various publications a special concern with Victorian and modernist cultures and a focus on a specific time period—in our case, the ‘now.’ Thus, the volume breaks new ground with its focus on twenty-first-century representations of science, as well as by offering a comparatively rare combination of contributions covering diverse scientific disciplines and different genres. Addressing novelistic fiction, poetry, film, and drama, and engaging with topics such as genetics, chemical weapons research, quantum physics, psychopharmacology, biotechnology, and digital technologies, this volume avoids delimiting the complexity of the field or the vagueness that investigations into the contemporary necessarily entail (see Boxall 2013 , 3; Hoydis 2015 , 5; Lea 2017 , 2).

The organisation of ten case studies in two sections, ‘Human Connectivities—Speculations and (Corpo)Realities’ and ‘Temporal Connectivities—(Neo-)Victorian to (Neo-)Modernist,’ reflects that the contributions in this volume approach representations of science from two main angles: in view of the place of the human in a web of relations (human connectivities) and regarding links between the twenty-first century and historical periods (temporal connectivities). We introduce the term ‘connectivity’ specifically to liberate thinking about literature and science from the rather tired metaphor of ‘two cultures,’ the only slightly less tired derivatives ‘three cultures’ or ‘one culture,’ as well as from the increasingly popular all-embracing concept of ‘networks.’ Connectivity, as we understand it, does not emphasise boundaries, disciplinary cultures, or institutional settings but is relational and encompasses realities as well as potentialities: as in popular and technical usage, we take ‘connectivity’ to mean both the quality and state of being connected and the capability of “being connective or connected” (“connectivity,” Merriam-Webster). Referring to an actual state as well as to possibility, the use of ‘connectivities’ pays tribute to the both real and speculative aspects of representations of science in twenty-first-century fiction. As we develop below, the term evokes globality and technology as the central means of experiencing connections in the present day and age, yet equally allows for the incorporation of historical and ethical dimensions. First, however, we examine how using the concept of ‘connectivities’ to grasp the relationship between science and literature offers a way to bracket questions of linear influence and direct connections, as well as to break open (for lack of a better term) the ‘network’ paradigm which often seems to suggest a systemic view.

In the twenty-first century, the term ‘network’ and its derivatives are seemingly everywhere, from talk about the Internet, social networks such as Facebook, and Manuel Castells’s notion of the ‘network society’ as a society relying on the fundamental unit of networks that are based on flow of information in electronic forms and function on a global scale (see 2000 , 60–1). Next to organisational networks and digital networking technologies, the term has undergone influential reconfiguration in Actor—Network Theory (ANT), most closely related to the name Bruno Latour. Latour acknowledges the infelicity of the term in ANT, not least because what is meant to designate a method is frequently confused with a thing, for example a technical network. “Network is a concept, not a thing out there,” Latour explains, and admits, “The word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago” (Latour 2005 , 131; 130). As a more fitting term to describe the work, movement, and change that the method entails, he offers ‘worknet’ but deems a change in terminology impractical (see 143; 132). This collection avoids the “terribly confusing” and “pretty horrible” (142) word ‘network’ with its competing meanings in common usage and ANT, and instead proposes to focus on ‘connectivity,’ which includes real and potential connections, local as well as global ones, and can involve merely two entities or an entire system.

If Latour has failed to eradicate confusions between ‘network’ as a method and the World Wide Web (Latour 2005 , 143), the field of literature and science has not completely shaken off the influence and repercussions of the “two cultures debate”—and it is perhaps unlikely that it will ever fully transcend the binary divisions it stipulates. However, ever since C.P. Snow first introduced the idea of the humanities and the sciences as two separate spheres or cultures in 1959, scholars have attempted to reconceptualise the relationship and highlight communalities, cross-overs, and cross-fertilisation between disciplines. And some of these attempts have gone a long way to inspiring fruitful interdisciplinary debates. Jerome Kagan, for example, examines the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities as “three cultures” and explores their interrelated struggles to “impose distinct meaning networks on their important concepts and […] compete with each other for dominance” (Kagan 2009 , 6). Meanwhile, prominent proponents of the ‘one culture’ model, such as George Levine, do not negate important differences between the disciplines but rather “attempt to consider ways in which literature and science might indeed be embraced in the same discourse, ways in which they have been so embraced” (Levine 1987 , 3). As Levine emphasises: “The ‘one culture’ is not a unified science and literature” (4; original emphasis). Rather, as he goes on to explain, it is one culture in the following two senses: first, any developments and events in science affect everything else, including literature, and, second, both participate in a similar manner in “the culture at large—in the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social, economic, and political communities which both generate and take their shape from them” (5–6). His is thus not an argument for collapsing the distinctiveness of science and literature into one indiscriminate ‘culture,’ but for identifying points of discursive convergence. And in this respect, Levine points out, “it is important to consider precisely how they do, why they do, whether the convergence is fortuitous, whether it can lead to important illuminations, to something like real dialogue, to genuine ‘influence’” (4). This collection of essays is less concerned with dialogic ‘influence’—all texts explicitly represent and thus are obviously ‘influenced’ by scientific topics and practices—and we are similarly cautious about presupposing a ‘convergence’ of science and literature. Instead, the notion of ‘connectivity’ brackets the debate of however many culture(s) we should use as theoretical frames of investigation and allows for a looser, and thus more permissible, idea of actual and possible connections of science and literature.

The idea of connectivities is particularly important in the area of globalisation: “Most frequently, in the twenty-first century, discussions of globalization emerge from the perception of an unprecedented critical mass of interconnectedness across the world. Equally, seminal descriptions of globalization suggest that many of the key terms hinge on the belief in a growing escalation of this interconnectedness” (Childs and Green 2013 , 1; original emphasis). The immense critical interest in globalisation and research into contemporary culture has found expression in a renewed focus on cosmopolitanism (Leggett and Venezia 2015 ; Schoene 2009 ; Shaw 2017 ) and theoretical concepts such as the planetary (Heise 2008 ) and cosmodernism (Moraru 2011 , 2016 ). These are all linked by an inherent concern with the globe and a sense of connectedness through shared ethical responsibility. This understanding of ethical connectivity differs from the technical-spatial connectivities offered by forms of (data or human) travel and communication. Accordingly, in a recent study of contemporary fiction, Daniel Lea contrasts “the Internet’s architecture of connectivity” which reveals “its limitations as a tool of connection” (Lea 2017 , 21) with another kind, namely “the duty of care that comes with humanness” (20). Christian Moraru’s notion of cosmodernism similarly proposes the period after 1989 to be characterised by relationality, or what he calls “being-in-relation, with another” (Moraru 2011 , 2). Such relationality is manifested in fictional narratives as an identity that is always created in relation to a wider context, surpassing the geopolitical and cultural limits of the USA, Moraru’s area of focus. Cosmodernism’s inherent ethical investment marks its disparity, or rather its onwards progression, from postmodernism—implicitly understood as a more socially disengaged, merely aesthetic practice—and offers a “rationale and vehicle for a new togetherness, for a solidarity across political, ethnic, racial, religious and other boundaries” (5).

The concept of connectivity is also commonly evoked to refer to a technological environment that can now be taken for granted as a, more or less, global phenomenon: the Internet, which offers greater than ever access to scientific ‘knowledge,’ connections, and circulation. Not least, and importantly for ethical considerations, significant parts of interactions between humans take place in the digital world and some may even turn out to involve human as well as non-human interlocutors. Literary texts probe how such new connectivities shape twenty-first-century narrations of the human and humanity and their relations to reality. In his introduction to twenty-first-century fiction, Peter Boxall stresses the role of technology in questioning who we are: “The destabilisation of the category of the human is also fuelled over this time by developments in technology—in biotechnology as well as in computing and information technology—developments which of course fed into the philosophical and theoretical environment” (Boxall 2013 , 88). Considering literary engagements with new technological forms and global relations, Boxall notes that texts contrast these with specific, material environments: “There is, in the fiction of the new century […] a strikingly new attention to the nature of our reality—its materiality, its relation to touch, to narrative and to visuality” (10). Daniel Lea similarly identifies materiality as one of the recurrent concerns in the twenty-first century:

Interpreted in the broadest sense of the relationships between the physical stuff of the world and the individuals with whom it comes into contact, materiality is a strikingly recurrent concern of these novelists. This is perhaps most evidently articulated in response to the liquefaction and virtualisation of social relations that has rendered the physical dimension so abstract in the digital age. On what levels of communication does the physical heft of touch operate in a world where interaction is increasingly mediated by technology? (Lea 2017 , 18)

The craving for materiality and reality that scholars detect in twenty-first-century fiction is also discernible in a shift from postmodernist playfulness to a new seriousness and realism, a currently widely discussed change in narratology and related fields. In 1998, Charles Altieri noted: “all the instruments agree that ‘postmodernism’ is no longer a vital concept for the arts” (Altieri 1998 , 1). Similarly, four years later Linda Hutcheon challenged theorists to find new descriptive terms for twenty-first-century writing, after firmly declaring postmodernism to be “over” (Hutcheon 2002 , 166), even though, she admitted, “its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on—as do those of modernism” (181). And this observation still holds true over a decade later, as the readings in this volume demonstrate. The pressures of the twenty-first century induce a turn away from playful experimentation with style and form, the proliferation of possibilities and worlds, and the questioning of objective truth, reason, and morality: many writers and other artists in the new millennium feel a need to move away from postmodernism and towards regaining sincerity and authenticity (see Hoydis 2019 ; Lea 2017 ; Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010 , 2011 ). Where David Shields asks to respond to this “reality hunger” ( 2010 ), in his commonly evoked ‘manifesto’ of the same title, with ‘more authentic’ literary forms such as life writing or the essay, Boxall summarises for fiction more broadly: “one can see the emergence of new kinds of realism, a new set of formal mechanisms with which to capture the real, as it offers itself as the material substrate of our being in the world” (Boxall 2013 , 10). This newly realist writing engages with the factual, the material, and the immediacy of things without merely returning to the style of classic nineteenth-century realism. Footnote 2 Rather, as Ulka Anjaria argues, realist fiction contains an “inbuilt paradox”—claiming allegiance to reality as well as to the ‘unreal,’ imaginative nature of fiction—that ensures that “21st-century realism is not a finished mode, but one perennially in progress” (Anjaria 2017 ) and thus constitutes an apt approach to explore the unfolding millennium.

Anjaria also helpfully examines the interrelations of notions of realism and connectivity. Twenty-first-century realism sheds new light, so she claims, on the question: “What is the relationship of literature to a world defined both by connectivity and fragmentation?” (Anjaria 2017 ). That is, a world characterised by the constant possibility of connecting with each other online and the disconnection of actual, physical lives. Meanwhile literary critic James Wood deplores a proliferation of relations and connectivities in literature that, so he argues, do not realistically represent reality and result in unconvincing stories abounding with seemingly coincidental but connected events: “what above all makes these stories unconvincing is precisely their very profusion, their relatedness. […] Yet it is the relatedness of these stories that their writers seem most to cherish, and to propose as an absolute value. An endless web is all they need for meaning” (Wood 2000 ). Wood contrasts connectedness with reality, humanity, and life, arguing that connectivity plasters over a lack of humanity and realism: “since the characters in these novels are not really alive, not fully human, their connectedness can only be insisted on,” rather than convincingly be shown (Wood 2000 ). Critical of Wood’s view and his celebration of nineteenth-century representations of character, Anjaria proposes twenty-first-century realism to be

not postmodernist, because it is receptive to the real conditions of the world it tries to represent, nor is it naively or nostalgically realist, because rather than hold a stable set of values as a response to the world, it refuses the formal closure characteristic of 19th-century realism in order to represent a reality constantly in flux. (Anjaria 2017 )

The concept of connectivity can help us grasp this state of taking account of connections to the real and, on the other hand, exploring possibilities and likelihoods, which means staying open to and cultivating the capacity for connectivity; both aspects are of particular relevance for representations of science in contemporary narratives.

The discussion of a possible return to or the reworking of realism leads to another key concept in this collection, temporal connectivities, particularly between the twenty-first century and the Victorian period or literary modernism of the early twentieth century. While Anglophone literature on both sides of the Atlantic has a strong long-standing tradition of historical fiction, Britain has seen a particular boom of the genre over the past two decades: successful examples, to name but a few, include the works of Hilary Mantel and a general upsurge of Neo-Victorian and Neo-Edwardian novels and TV series such as Sherlock Holmes , Penny Dreadful , Ripper Street , Downton Abbey , and Mr. Selfridge . Neo-Victorian scholar Marie-Louise Kohlke suggests that the popularity of the genre is based “less on its historical accuracy than in its receptivity to ‘reverse projections’ of contemporary consciousness” ( 2015 , 12), echoing a general function of historical fiction as a dual means of escape from and response to the contemporary (see also Miller 2011 ). Once more it appears that it is primarily the resurging concern with the ethical that reasserts itself in new fictions set in the past. Identifying temporality and “a fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history” as one of the main topical and aesthetic concerns in twenty-first-century literature, Peter Boxall notes how this trend is explicitly linked to “a new sense of a responsibility to material historical forces that constrain or shape the fictional imagination” ( 2013 , 41–2; original emphasis).

While there is consensus on these emerging topics and discussions across recent studies, a focus on how they relate to science in fiction is still missing. This volume addresses this gap. It ties in with studies of twenty-first-century fiction, but resolves one of the typically lamented issues, the obvious problem of dealing with a very wide, heterogeneous and yet hard to categorise field, by narrowing it down to fictions engaging with a topic included in all recent collections: science.

Considering the above, we might ask how the current engagement with the Victorian and modernist periods relates to fictional representations of science and is juxtaposed with the typically speculative view of science fiction, the genre that carries the connection between science and literature in its very name. Damien Walter identifies an emerging genre that is “not science fiction [… or] realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between” (Walter 2014 ) and proposes to use the term “transrealism,” as established by Rudy Rucker in the early 1980s. Transrealist texts, so Walter explains, are firmly rooted in reality while introducing a single fantastic idea: this does not allow for the comforts of confirming a stable reality or offering escapism but creates the disconcerting sense that “reality is at best constructed, at worst non-existent” (Walter 2014 ). Where Walter maintains that science fiction and mainstream literature “are increasingly hard to separate” (Walter 2014 ), science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson makes the related argument that wild speculations about scientific and technological inventions that characterised his genre in the early twentieth century are no longer possible today, as our lives are so saturated by science and technology that any speculation turns out to be reality already:

I think I do science fiction because I feel like if you’re going to write realism about our time, science fiction is simply the best genre to do it in. This is because we’re living in a big science fiction novel now that we all co-write together. […] You write science fiction and you’re actually writing about the reality that we’re truly in, and that’s what novels ought to do. (Robinson 2015 )

These being perspicuous observations, Robinson also reflects on the relation of science fiction to the ethical: “‘Science’ implies the world of fact and what we all agree on seems to be true in the natural world. ‘Fiction’ implies values and meanings, the stories we tell to make sense of things.” Robinson points out that it can seem impossible to simultaneously describe the facts of the world as it is and to imagine how it ought to be. Yet, as Robinson continues, “here is a genre that claims to be a kind of ‘fact-values’ reconciliation, a bridge between the two. Can it be? Well, no, not really—but it can try” (Robinson 2015 ). A number of contributions in this volume examine how literary representations of science identify connectivities between facts and values and try to balance ethical responsibilities to the real and to the imaginary. More generally speaking, the ten chapters in this collection ask how, why, and to what effects fictional writing about science returns to realist modes and to the past, and examine how twenty-first-century novels, poetry, film, and drama engage with tensions between facts and values, realism and speculation, views of the past and visions of the future.

In Part I, ‘Human Connectivities—Speculations and (Corpo)Realities,’ five chapters engage with the place of the human in a web of relations and a reorientation of fiction’s allegiances to reality and speculation. The authors examine the role of science and technology in questioning and redefining the human from various angles, including consequences of the biomedical sciences, genetic modifications, and new technologies that redefine reading practices. The first two chapters note a shift from focusing on immaterial mental states to exploring effects of science and technology on the material brain, and analyse literary explorations of ways in which science and technology shape human subjectivity, what has been considered its corporeal ‘seat’ in the brain, and our understanding of relations between them. Natalie Roxburgh’s “The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction” studies representations of drugs and medications during and after ‘the decade of the brain’ when attention shifted from the subjective experience of the mind to the physical structure of the brain. Roxburgh compares postmodernist novels with those written in a style of new realism, thus engaging on the level of form with a shift in focus from subjective experience to objective materiality, concluding that recent psychopharmacological novels employ and reflect a move towards more realist modes of representation. Roxburgh further uses these texts to explore the idea that science and technology in the twenty-first-century “risk society” (Ulrich Beck) can be grasped with the logic of the pharmakon that is both remedy and poison. Chapter 3 by Julius Greve, “Neuropathologies: Cognition, Technology, and the Network Paradigm in Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Dave Eggers’s The Circle ,” asks about the place of cognition and technology in contemporary fiction and argues for “a conceptual shift from psycho- to neuropathology.” A main reason he identifies for such a shift is the “convergence of today’s technologies of cognition and the network paradigm”: the sense that ‘everything is connected’ that is intricately interwoven with the use of technology. Examining two popular fictional explorations of cognition and technology, Greve’s chapter engages with the threats and opportunities of connectivities in the twenty-first century.

The next two contributions turn to the role of scientific theories and new technologies on narrative design and reading practices. Both interrogate the potential role of new media to frame new narratives. Chapter 4 , “New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction” by Kanta Dihal, focuses on how texts use theories in quantum physics to challenge the concept of identity and open new possibilities of narration, focalisation, plot, and structure. Comparing printed texts with the iOS app Arcadia (2015) by Iain Pears, Dihal speculates that the new media provide opportunities for further narrative innovations. Where this chapter concludes that the potential of new media, for example for interactive narratives, has not been fully explored in narratives engaging with quantum physics, the following contribution examines the close connections of technology and changing reading practices in digital poetry. In Chapter 5 , “Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body,” Paola Carbone discusses digital poems that reconfigure the main features of concrete poetry and draw attention to reading as an active, sensual process. Identifying a new focus on the physicality of text and on the inclusion of the human body in digital poetry, Carbone’s contribution shows not only that technology disconnects us from material reality when it “recede[s] behind the computer screen” (Lea 2017 , 19) but that it can also create new connectivities between body and text.

The final chapter in this section, Pia Balsmeier’s “Towards a Posthumanist Conceptualization of Society: Biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation ,” refocuses human connectivities explicitly onto the notion of the ‘human’ and its ontological and ethical limits by exploring the role of biotechnology in the conceptualisation of collective identity as a (post)human(ist) society. Following a careful mapping of different currents in thinking about the posthuman, Balsmeier focuses on fictional texts from North America that explore how the most widespread form of biotechnology, namely genetically modified food, affects human identities. Analysing novels by Atwood and Ozeki, Balsmeier examines how anthropocentric and essentialist views on identity, race, gender, and family can be overcome by more valuable connectivities based on elective affiliations.

Part II, “Temporal Connectivities—(Neo-)Victorian to (Neo-)Modernist,” continues the concern with ethical issues and scientific progress, yet the examples discussed here share a strong link to history rather than to speculative futures. Chapters 7 and 8 both engage with the pervasive, ongoing fascination with the Victorian age, with the lives and discoveries of nineteenth-century scientists, and the impact of the era’s gendered and racialised politics on the contemporary imagination. First, Paul Hamann traces genealogies of genetics in two British science novels, Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman , employing these examples to identify the historicising of scientific knowledge and practice as a new trend in the history of the novel. He argues that the foregrounding of scientific historical difference in Mawer’s and Byatt’s texts reflects the central tenet of twentieth-century philosophy of science that scientific epistemology is historically specific. At the same time, Hamann uncovers the novels’ engagements with past genetic practice as a critique of genetics in the twenty-first century. Exploring the literary forms through which the two novels historicise genetic science, this chapter adds an original perspective to the question of how the aesthetics of texts informs and is informed by their investigation of scientific epistemology. This is followed by Elizabeth Gilbert’s analysis of British writer Frances Hardinge’s genre-poaching young adult novel The Lie Tree , a fusion of Gothic, Neo-Victorian, fantasy, and detective fiction. Set just a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species , the narrative details the female protagonist’s struggle for scientific knowledge and truth against the confines of gender stereotypes and popular pseudo- or anti-scientific beliefs.

While these two contributions testify to lasting legacies of the Victorian era in current representations of science, modernism and the violent ruptures of the early twentieth century up to the Second World War provide a rival source of imagination and raise, if anything, even more haunting ethical questions. Moving from prose fiction to film, in Chapter 9 , Norbert Schaffeld analyses Matthew Brown’s 2015 The Man Who Knew Infinity from a postcolonial vantage point. This maths film, indicative of the current popularity of biopics and other forms of life writing, explores a commonly fictionalised phase in the history of mathematics, focusing on the encounter of two scientific ‘geniuses,’ Cambridge professor G.H. Hardy and the self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and the latter’s tragically short life. The film’s postcolonial stance, Schaffeld argues, makes use of temporal connectivities by reinvesting the spatio-temporal frame of early twentieth-century academic culture with today’s problems of racism and institutional exclusion. It furthermore poses questions about the genre and truth claims of contemporary historical fiction.

Similarly set in the early twentieth century is Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day , the example under scrutiny in Chapter 10 . Simon de Bourcier’s analysis of Pynchon’s complex text focuses on its entangled relationship with both modernism and postmodernism, presenting a twenty-first-century aesthetic fusion that is as yet hard to fully grasp. De Bourcier suggests that the novel’s narrative aesthetics conforms, in fact, to Vermeulen and van den Akker’s concept of metamodernism. In his reading of central scenes and the author’s engagement with the technological and ideological contexts of modernism, Futurism, and Fascism, de Bourcier employs Slavoj Žižek’s opposition between modernist absence and the ‘obscene object’ of postmodernity, as well as theorisations of technology by Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler.

The final chapter, “Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone ,” tackles the realm of contemporary stagings of the history and ethics of science. Ellen Moll applies theories by feminist technoscience philosophers Karen Barad, Katie King, and Donna Haraway to the 2012 play The Forbidden Zone by Duncan Macmillan and Katie Mitchell. Her reading shows how the play employs experimental theatrical techniques, including live cinema, to explore the ethical-political ramifications of chemical weapons research and its relationship to sexism and other forms of oppression. Focusing on the lives of historical figures Clara Immerwahr and her granddaughter Claire Haber, the play presents science as firmly tied to the notion of a modernity defined by apocalypse, forcing the audience, as Moll suggests, into an awareness of what Katie King termed “pastpresents,” an examination of the mutually constructing nature of past and present.

The ongoing representations of science, scientists, and scientific practice with which the ten chapters in this volume engage are indicative of the fact that new developments in science and technology continue to change our life-world, the way humans interact with each other, and how they understand themselves and their place among other beings and in the world. This collection investigates what concepts, forms, and topical issues have emerged in the past few decades—not claiming to offer a complete survey, but discussing examples which suggest narrative modes and themes that we believe are of wider significance and likely to shape engagement with literature and science and the field of twenty-first-century fiction in the future. Thus, this volume is a starting point; each of the areas addressed here calls for further study: the impact of technology, digitalisation, and new media on prose, poetry, and drama, posthumanism, genetics, pharmacology, neuropathology, and, as always, the relation of science (histories) to intersectional identity politics. While not aiming for comprehensiveness—not in text selection, choice of authors, kinds of science, or in regard to aesthetic developments—it bears testimony to the unquestionable “centrality of science as knowledge, as practice and as a strong symbol of modernity” (James and Bud 2018 , 386). Examining the new forms that this central interest in science takes at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the volume investigates what we could call the ‘connective value’ or the value of connectivities between different aspects of twenty-first-century experience, imagination, and writing. Not least, the case studies in this collection demonstrate what Michelle Antoinette describes as “the connective medium of art itself as a vital key in forging connection” (Antoinette 2014 , 23)—they reveal how fiction can forge connections between ideas, human beings, and their realities and potentialities in times past, in the present, and in times to come.

Change history

23 june 2022.

Chapter 1 was previously published as non-open access. It has now been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.0 license and the copyright holder has been updated to “The Author(s).”

See, for example, the ‘Global AI Narratives’ Project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, UK, led by Stephen Cave and Sarah Dillon (2018–).

While this ‘reality hunger’ is associated with a re-emerging desire for authenticity as a rejection of falsity and ‘fake news,’ Frederic Jameson rightly reminds us of the problem of defining what is actually meant by a ‘return’ to realism, that is, to what realism is supposed to be opposed here, for example, romance, modernism, idealism, or fantasy (see Jameson 2015 , 2). See also Birke and Butter ( 2013 ) on the renewed critical interest in realism in contemporary art and culture and debates on what is perceived as realist work.

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How Technology Is Changing The Literary World

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How is technology changing the way people consume literature? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Cassandra Clarke , Author of ' Star's End ' and five other novels, on Quora :

One of the main impacts technology has had on society and culture in general is breaking down boundaries, making it both easier and harder to find things that were previously obscure. And I think that’s as true with literature as it is with anything else.

In a lot of ways the Internet feels like one enormous dinner party conversation, with little pockets of conversation that someone can drop into or drop out of at will. So much has been written about how much easier it is to find information now, via than the Internet, than it ever was before. That one weird thing you’re super into? No one in your home town had ever heard of it, but with the Internet, you can find a whole community that’s into it. This is what happens when you have a flood of information.

But a flood isn’t necessarily a good thing, right? And I think that’s one way that literature has been impacted—there are   so many   books and stories and poems available, and it can be overwhelming sorting through them. We wind up with a tyranny of choice, as it has been called, where having too many choices just paralyzes us. I think this is one of the reasons why we wind up with 'Best Of' book lists that consist of the same familiar names. As readers, all of those choices tend to blur together. It’s hard to know what is good and what’s worth reading, and so we stick with old favorites.

On the other hand, social media has made it easier for people to discuss books and literature. Book Twitter, book blogs, Booktube—all of these are previously unimaginable methods of sharing books we love (and hate; this is the Internet, after all). This ties in with the idea of the Internet breaking down boundaries—on a single website like Twitter, I can get book recommendations from people all over the world, rather than just from a small circle of friends I know in Houston. I’m introduced to books I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of, and because it comes with a recommendation from someone I at least sort of know, it doesn’t get swept up in the overwhelming rush of material out there.

Of course, like a flood, eroded boundaries aren’t always for the best. In addition to getting and giving recommendations, social media has allowed writers and readers to connect more easily than they ever could before. While this sounds great in theory—and actually is great in practice—it also blurs the distinction between reader and writer. A common refrain in literary criticism is that the author is dead—except the author   isn’t   dead, they’re vanity searching their name in Twitter to see what people are saying about them.   Or   a critic has tagged the writer in a particularly virulent review to get a rise out of them. And now that very-much-alive author feels the need to explain what they really meant, or to defend themselves, or whatever. While it has always been true that writers can’t control how readers react to their work, the Internet has made the reader-writer relationship feel more like a back and forth conversation, when previously I think it had been more one-way.

This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter , Facebook , and Google+ . More questions:

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A technological age-especially an extremely brilliant and suc- cessful one-has difficulty in finding a proper role for literature. Such a society sees literature as a diversion, as a mere amuse- ment at best; and so it is classed as a luxury, perhaps an added grace to adorn the high culture that the technology itself has built. Yet such homage obscures the real importance of litera- ture and all of the humanities. It classes them as decorative lux- uries, whereas in truth they are the necessary...

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• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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• > Technology in Irish Literature and Culture
• > Introduction

Book contents

• Technology in Irish Literature and Culture
• Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Genealogies
• Part II Infrastructures
• Part III Invention
• Part IV The Digital

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2023

In editing this volume of essays, Technology in Irish Literature and Culture , for the Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture series, we are pleased to accept the dual invitation delivered by series editor Ronan McDonald: in his words, ‘to choose a significant issue that animates or perplexes contemporary Irish culture, and use it as an aperture through which to examine the literature of previous eras’. Our choice of subject is technology, a subject of fundamental significance to our current condition, and central to very many of our contemporary concerns, vexations, pleasures, and opportunities.

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• By Margaret Kelleher , James O’Sullivan
• Edited by Margaret Kelleher , University College Dublin , James O'Sullivan , University College Cork
• Book: Technology in Irish Literature and Culture
• Online publication: 19 January 2023
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182881.002

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Essay on “Literature and modern technology” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Literature and modern technology

   It is usually believed these days that literature is out of place in the present day technological milieu. Technology has registered unprecedented achievements the world over. It has resulted in affluence and prosperity for all, so there seems no need for literature to grow. The world’s top brains are involved these days in the processing of scientific achievements and fruitful applications of new inventions and the relevance of literature and art, poetry, drama and essay, seems too small for people of high caliber to digest.

       Science, provides knowledge and power, and both science and technology affect life at several points, though the extent and utility of the applications are determined by our culture, our wisdom and our priorities. Modern technology is increasingly dominating the world and the domination is likely to become more pronounced in future because of the fast developments tending to subdue, creating human thinking and expression.

     But the belief that literature would have no place in future life of man is equally erroneous. Technology has created robots, artificial intelligence in the shape of thinking computers which can read, translate, interpret and give decisions with amazing speed and accuracy, but not such mechanical devices to produce literacy compositions poetry, prose, drama, novels and stories. As such, there is no reason to believe that the mechanical way of life, in which our actions are governed more and more by computer culture and electronic calculators of all types, will destroyed the talent of writers, authors, poets, biographers and artists. Rather it can generally promote the climate for expressions of talent in various channels by providing firstly enough leisure, as the technology is creating leisure by introducing labor saving and time saving devices. The leisure thus created can be fruitfully put to literary pursuits.

    Literature, in reality is the product of thought of every sane and gifted people, who live in all ages and they need an environment of peace and tranquility and naturally the advancement of present day accompanied with the comforts of life provided by the modern technology can promote better literature and masterpieces in the arts.  Scientists and technologies do not encroach upon the field of literature as it is the source of great peace and inspiration for materialistic related distractions of the mind. Literature is an essential part of culture and its values cherished by people since time immemorial and technological progress cannot affords to cause decay and neglect of nature and her processes. The machine must not enslave man completely as it is the human spirit which must be enslave man completely as it is the human spirit which must be decisive especially regarding the right uses of technology. The latest drift to technology has to be adjusted and regulated so as not to let the latent aspects of culture fade away and make human being a machine.

   There are people who are of the opinion that science demolishes faith and tradition, it produces skepticism anxiety and even tension as it doubts everything, even some of the cherished values. Technology has helped science to produce weapons of destruction and it has further deteriorated the areas of peace. Here the literature gets suppressed. The artists and poets who prepare the literary pieces get suppressed and they are suffers.

    Technology, as such, is not averse to literature, nor should it be. It is only when technology is not used in a worthwhile direction, when it is used to produce military hardware and things to terrorize mankind that literature goes in the background. The pieces of art the literature, poetry, prose, drama, etc, are the source of sustenance of the soul of man. In today ever-increasing tensions of day to day, good literature makes a lasting impact on the mind; it entertains, instructs and enables the spirit of human beings. There is a strong reason for such impact of literary pieces on human spirit. The poets and artists have been souls gifted   exclusively for the works created by them. No ordinary men could venture into the field of literature, so the pieces of literature produced by this genius of men and women had a strange power of giving solace to depressed souls.

      It is the duty of the state to take steps to humanize the conditions created by technological advances, such as those created by industrialization. If proper steps are not taken there is scandalous exploitation of labor, the child and female labor, horrible housing conditions and above all degradation of human spirit. Some worthwhile outlets are necessary for the budding youth to think other than the technological occupations or to develop a taste for some cherished cultural values including art and literature. The dismal state of affairs associated with technological progress in not the fault of the technologists. The instruments are not faulty, in fact it is how they are put to use and often they are put to vicious use.

     It is quite unfortunate that the modern youth are distancing away from the rich realm of literature especially. This drift has deteriorated their personality as the cherished old values of this country are not valued by them an they are fast adopting the western culture with its pure industrial and technological base resulting into growing unrest in them. The fault lies in the system which does not provide sufficient opportunities for them to develop talents in art and literature which would otherwise keep their heads cool and cherish the technological advancement with a greater taste. Where there is less patronage of art and talent, there is bound to be less of literature of permanent value because the right spirit and mood are not there to promote it. The present educational curriculum does not sufficiently provide for development of literary values and appreciation of the masterpieces of art the literature as it stresses more upon acquiring knowledge of science and technology in schools and colleges.

      It is time that modern planners and educationists no longer ignore the value of art the literature among the future generations of this country as it is an established fact that art and culture can promote the technological culture to its truly desired ends. It is well within the power of man to exercise sound judgments and pursue right priorities to shape a better world where literature flourishes along with industry and technology.

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Technology-Enabled Innovation in Financial Markets and Retail Investors a Systematic Literature Review

42 Pages Posted: 11 Sep 2024

Bangor University

Laurence Jones

Bangor Business School

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Adrian Gepp

Bond University - Bond Business School

The advent of technology-enabled innovation (TEI), in particular regarding the Internet, social networks, and mobile technologies, has profoundly reshaped financial markets. This transformation has notably influenced the dynamics of retail investors, a cohort whose prominence has surged in recent years. Our paper thoroughly reviews the emerging research area that explores the nexus between these technological advancements and retail investors. A systematic literature search resulted in 2,877 publications, from which detailed bibliometric and content analyses are performed on 171 studies of relevance. Our paper contributes to the literature by identifying the emergence of four core themes: (i) the information diffusion across financial markets through collective retail investor attention, sentiment, and trading activity; (ii) the dual-edged nature of TEI’s impacts on retail investors decision-making and risk-taking; (iii) the role of TEI in democratizing the acquisition and dissemination of corporate information; and (iv) the acceptance and adoption of TEI by retail investors. We document the need for more papers on advancing theoretical models and formulating regulations with an emphasis on risk management to mitigate the negative effects of rapidly evolving TEIs, especially GenAI-powered tools, on the market and vulnerable retail investors. To conclude, the comprehensive review reveals areas where further research is needed in pursuit of improved market environment.

Keywords: Retail Investors, Technology-enabled innovations, fintech, Systematic literature review

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Bangor Business School ( email )

Bangor Business School College Road Gwynedd LL57 2DG, Wales LL57 2DG United Kingdom

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Bond University - Bond Business School ( email )

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