Digital Literary Creative Practice

In 1985 Italo Calvino proposed six values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into the next millennium: lightness, quickness, crystal exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Using Italo Calvinos Six Memos for the Next Millennium as structure and methodology, this book conjoins literary studies with creative practice to interrogate, extend/subvert, and then reflect on the aesthetic and structural ambitions of multiple innovative print authors (Italo Calvino, Zadie Smith, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Bernardine Evaristo, Roberto Bolao, Rachel Cusk, Shahriar Mandanipour, W.G. Sebald, Ross Gibson, Arundhati Roy, Han Kang, and J.M. Coetzee) reimagined in new media in order to develop a model for digital literary practice-led research. This work contains four strands that are presented simultaneously. First, this monograph explores the rise of Calvinos values within the Calvino corpus. Second, this values application to a contemporary literary predicament is explored through a digression. Third, conclusions from this interrogation are drawn as relates to digital literary culture. Finally, the values importance is demonstrated through examining/reflecting on contemporary digital literary creative practice both the authors own and works created by contemporary writers/artists who have engaged with the digital postmodern.