‘Swiping right on the media novel’ – Interview with Dong Xia and Sandro Eich, Guest Editors of ‘Novel Media/Media Novel’ for C21 Literature
Posted by Katie da Cunha Lewin on 2025-11-26
During their shared time as doctoral candidates at the University of St Andrews, Dr Dong Xia and Dr Sandro Eich came up with the idea of a collection of essays on the relationship between digital media and contemporary fiction, and proposed a special issue of C21 Literature in 2023.
Two years and two doctorates later, ‘Novel Media / Media Novel’ was published in November 2025. Dong is currently the Postdoctoral Researcher in New Media and Digital Culture at Leiden University in the research project ‘Contagious Digitalities’ and Sandro works as Academic Policy Officer for the University of St Andrews. In this interview, they share how they had the idea for this special issue and what it means that digital media has found its way into the literary imagination of the twenty-first century.
What led you to develop ‘Novel Media / Media Novel’?
Sandro Eich – As we are both early-career researchers, we were aware of the different kinds of skills and experiences which we would need on the academic job market for a life after the PhD. When I joined the Executive Committee for the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS), I became aware that the editors at the time were interested in commissioning new special issues. Because in both Dong’s and my PhDs theses, we were working within the field of contemporary literary studies but also media studies (Dong from a more theoretical perspective, and me from a discourse analytic perspective), we thought co-editing a special issue for C21 could be a nice opportunity to bring our expertise together to investigate some of the phenomena that we had come across in our reading of contemporary literature representing digital media.
Dong Xia – We began planning on this special issue in a response to an open call by C21, circulated via the BACLS newsletter. At the later stage of our PhDs, we were both considering taking our individual projects towards a more collaborative project, one that built a community for the researchers with shared interests in the intersection between literary studies and digital media studies. Therefore, when Sandro suggested to me to work on a special issue together, I was thrilled and since we were already familiar with each other’s research, it took no time to come up with the theme.
In your ‘Editorial’, you write that you 'celebrate the scene that gives rise to a diversity of approaches and ways of meaning-making’—could you say a bit more about what you find so exciting about the intersection between literature and digital media?
DX – As someone researching digital media culture in the humanities, I share the anxiety that scholarship often arrives too late—always chasing technologies that have already evolved. What I find interesting about literature is that it suffers less from this belatedness. Literature does not need to depict digital technologies directly in order to respond to them. It is for this reason, as we emphasised in the editorial, that in this special issue we foreground the non-referential relationship between literature (novels in this case) and digital media. I am not saying that literature is immune from this belatedness. Nor is the case that art forms like digital media art, of which I am a huge fan, are less capable of commenting on the digitisation of many aspects of contemporary living. Literature attunes in its own way its rhetorical and formal techniques to the technical atmosphere which the writers inhabit, rather than through immediate topical engagement. This indirectness also gives literary scholars leverage to critically address digital media which is commonly conceived of being irrepresentable. Literary studies, as a discipline that has been grappling with the art and crisis of representation for ages, has developed a set of critical tools and vocabularies to address the irrepresentable without simply mirroring it or positivising it.
SE – Digital media, in a similar way to how literature has done this historically, forced itself into the daily lives of people in the twenty-first century. If you are ‘off-the-grid’ in our current day and age, chances are that you will miss out on forms of information and discourse that could meaningfully shape your experience of the world. Looking at how digital media are staged in contemporary writing gives us an opportunity to consider literature and digital media’s shared capacity of meaning making, and how this can be conceptualised through imaginative writing. Especially in times of fake news, AI deep-fakes, and populist misinformation, we thought it was valuable to consider how we collectively conceive of the role that digital media plays in this media ecology; and as we are both literary scholars, it seemed the obvious choice for us to do so by asking how literature responds to these developments. We felt that the form of the novel would prove particularly interesting to investigate due to its longstanding function of historicising; an attempt to make sense of the human and more-than-human condition through its arrangement of characters, plots, and forms of narrative presentation in diverse ways.
Lastly, what sort of future do you see for the contemporary literary studies on the basis of the work in ‘Novel Media / Media Novel’?
SE – If there is one thing that we have learnt from editing ‘Novel Media/Media Novel’ it is that contemporary literature and the digital sphere are meaningfully entangled: it is likely that we will be seeing more novels that engage with the effects of social media on our collective sense of community, the impacts of accelerated developments in the field of artificial intelligence on both humans and the environment, and how we, more generally, understand the history of humanity as constructed through and within a diverse media ecology that will continue to change. It will be particularly interesting to see what role contemporary literature (and the form of the novel) will play in this: will it be a petri-dish to examine the ethical limits of technological developments, taking up a kind of didactic function? Or will it harness the mobilising power of storytelling and narrative to contributing to shaping these developments, as it has already done in the past in forms of science fiction writing? My educated guess is that it will do both, so it will be important for literary scholars, and readers more widely, to stay alert to these possibilities.
DX – One of my favourite anecdotes in the field of literary media studies comes from John Barth. He recounts sitting in Hugh Kenner’s class and questioning Kenner’s claim that ‘literature changed after the nineteenth century when it came to be composed on typewriters instead of penned’. Barth objected, noting that he himself still preferred penmanship. Kenner replied, ‘All the same, you grew up breathing the air of literature composed on the typewriter’. It is this ‘air of literature’ that I think contemporary literary studies is tasked with examining. What constitutes the ‘air of literature’ in the twenty-first century? What kind of digital atmosphere do we inhabit when almost all types of writing take place through computational interfaces and devices? Air, as a figure, captures both the irrepresentability and the inevitability of digital and informational technologies in our time—an ambience that literary studies needs to register and account for. In a way, this anecdote is also about the affinity between literary writing and its corresponding technological environment in the sense that language and literature bear the imprints of technicity. Therefore, to account for the ‘air of literature’ is to account for the technicity of language and literature in order to better understand digital machines which behave at once technically and rhetorically. Yet it is worth pointing out that air can be toxic and polluted, and is increasingly heated, as the result of digital capitalism. Attending to this atmosphere of literature, therefore, is not only a matter of understanding its technical and aesthetic conditions, but also of exploring the creative and critical potentials for responding to—and resisting—the regimes of information that shape our (digital) environment.
Read their issue here. If you are interested in pitching a special issue to C21 Literature more information can be found about the process here.