This book explores the growing body of multimodal literary texts: books that creatively experiment with the potential of design to represent narrative content. Examining five North and Central American novels from the first two decades of the twenty-first century, this study draws attention to texts that combine verbal text (writing) with non-verbal elements (photographic images, varied typography, maps, color, etc.) as integral parts of their narratives. Their experimentation both reconfigures the potential for print-based (and born-digital) fiction in the future, and holds a mirror to past practices of design and typography that were rendered invisible, or which received limited attention by authors, publishers, and readers. By placing the five case studies and related texts within a broader history of experimentation in literature, this book demonstrates how multimodal novels have changed the conceptualization of narrative content in literary texts and ushered in a new era for fiction.

This groundbreaking work takes multimodality studies in a new direction by applying multimodal approaches to the study of poetry and poetics. The book examines poetry’s visual and formal dimensions, applying framing theory to such case studies as Aristotle’s Poetics and Robert Lowell’s "The Heavenly Rain", to demonstrate both the implied, due to the form’s unique relationship with structure, imagery, and rhythm, and explicit forms of multimodality at work, an otherwise little-explored research strand of multimodality studies. The volume explores the theoretical implications of a multimodal approach to poetry and poetics to other art forms and fields of study, making this essential reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of language and communication, including multimodality, discourse analysis, and interdisciplinary literary studies.

What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future? The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf. Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future. This volume is the ideal introduction for those approaching the study of experimental literature for the first time or looking to further their knowledge.

Since the turn of the millennium, there has seen an increase in the inclusion of typography, graphics and illustration in fiction. This book engages with visual and multimodal devices in twenty-first century literature, exploring canonical authors like Mark Z. Danielewski and Jonathan Safran Foer alongside experimental fringe writers such as Steve Tomasula, to uncover an embodied textual aesthetics in the information age. Bringing together multimodality and cognition in an innovative study of how readers engage with challenging literature, this book makes a significant contribution to the debates surrounding multimodal design and multimodal reading. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, semiotics, visual perception, visual communication, and multimodal analysis, Gibbons provides a sophisticated set of critical tools for analysing the cognitive impact of multimodal literature.

Upon its initial release in Arabic in the fall of 2014, Using Life received acclaim in Egypt and the wider Arab world. But in 2016, Ahmed Naji was sentenced to two years in prison after a reader complained that an excerpt published in a literary journal harmed public morality. His imprisonment marks the first time in modern Egypt that an author has been jailed for a work of literature. Writers and literary organizations around the world rallied to support Naji, and he was released in December 2016. His original conviction was overturned in May 2017 but, at the time of printing, he is awaiting retrial and banned from leaving Egypt. Set in modern-day Cairo, Using Life follows a young filmmaker, Bassam Bahgat, after a secret society hires him to create a series of documentary films about the urban planning and architecture of Cairo. The plot in which Bassam finds himself ensnared unfolds in the novel's unique mix of text and black-and-white illustrations. The Society of Urbanists, Bassam discovers, is responsible for centuries of world-wide conspiracies that have shaped political regimes, geographical boundaries, reigning ideologies, and religions. It is responsible for today's Cairo, and for everywhere else, too. Yet its methods are subtle and indirect: it operates primarily through manipulating urban architecture, rather than brute force. As Bassam immerses himself in the Society and its shadowy figures, he finds Cairo on the brink of a planned apocalypse, designed to wipe out the whole city and rebuild anew.

This book advocates for a new analytical framework that extends our understanding of multimodal meaning-making in the novel. Integrating theoretical traditions from stylistics and the influential social semiotic approach to multimodal communication developed by Kress and van Leeuwen, Nørgaard applies this method of analysis in order to build on existing stylistic practices that look at linguistic features in the novel to encompass other semiotic resources found in the form, such as typography, layout, images, paper and book-cover design. The volume grounds the discussion with supporting examples from novels that feature experimentation with multiple semiotic resources as well as more traditional novels, furthering the argument that all novels are inherently multimodal. Offering new insights and tools for unpacking multimodal meaning-making in this critical literary genre, this volume is an indispensable resource for graduate students and researchers in multimodality, stylistics and literary studies.

Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives interrogates the relationship of fictionality and the multimodal use of fact in modern narrative construction.