From ‘Inanimate Alice’ to ‘The Mistress of Nothing’: the Novel in Print and Online

This PhD by Published Works consists of three published works, Inanimate Alice, The Mistress of Nothing, and Flight Paths: A Networked Novel and a supporting thesis, From Inanimate Alice to The Mistress of Nothing: The Novel in Print and Online.
All three published works are fiction. The Mistress of Nothing is a work of literary fiction, Inanimate Alice is a digital fiction, a multimedia work that resides online in episodes, and Flight Paths: A Networked Novel, is a networked book, a work of fiction that exists on several digital platforms simultaneously. The Mistress of Nothing is the work of a single author, whereas Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths: A Networked Novel are both collaboratively authored.
The thesis forms a critical and reflective commentary on the three published works. It explores the works as exemplars of current writing and publishing practice in the context of the digital transformation of the publishing industry. It demonstrates the sustained research effort that has gone into the creation of all three works, as well as the original contribution to literature these works make.
Publishing is changing rapidly, and writing, reading and bookselling are changing with it. Digitisation is transforming the book as an artefact of literary culture. While writers are urged to engage with social media to market their books, storytelling itself is evolving with the new technologies. Over the past twenty years I have produced a series of landmark works in the parallel fields of digital fiction and traditional print fiction, and it is on these works that this submission for a PhD by Published Works rests.