Rethinking the Story so Far: Transmedial Considerations on Literariness and Narrativity

This book review covers two recent works which explore contemporary narrative and literary media through a transmedial lens. As will be argued, The Routledge Companion to Literary Media (2023) approaches literariness as part of a media ecology rather than as being present in isolated art forms. The essay collection edited by Ensslin, Round, and Thomas deals with how literature and other (analogue as well as digital) media shape each other and how this affects readers. In doing so, the contributors consider multiple aspects and actors involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of literary media ranging from locative narratives to podcasts, as well as their diverse materialities. In a similar vein, Playing at Narratology (2019) treats narrativity as a phenomenon which resists rigid medial classification. Punday, who had previously explored the role of the novel in the present-day media landscape in Writing at the Limit (2012), revisits narrative in a broader sense as a transmedial phenomenon and revises concepts from traditional narratology with the help of digital media artefacts. The essay discusses these volumes with particular reference to literature’s embeddedness in the media system and the importance of accounting for medium-specific affordances.