Literary Hypertext

The end of the 20th century brought with it a new writing format – hypertext. Hypertext is created by piecing together nodes and links. The new format was perceived by the literature’s scholarly community as a way for realizing structuralist and post-structuralist ideas, thus creating a ‘new literature’.

In this book, Dr. Hava Ritter-Cohen looks back at the hypertext literature written between 1985, the genre foundation, and 2000, which is the end of its peak time. The book explores, whether or not this genre met the expectations created around it, and what place it achieved in comparison to print literature. 

The book refers to many of the prominent research articles of the time and new ones, relevant to this comparison. The print literature discussed in the book is wide spread, starting with Stern’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), through, to mention only some, Dickens (1860-61), Apollinaire (1913-1916) Robbe-Grillet (1959) to Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (2007).