The electronic editor

This article is a study of literary mediation in the age of the e-book. It focuses on a specific editorial project being undertaken by scholarly editors in the present day, when the late age of print is giving way to the digital age. The author argues that the present moment represents a deceptively strong period for print publishing, but an uncertain and experimental period for literature, a time when the values and practices that order the literary field are no longer well-defined. The spread of digital culture is reconfiguring the make-up of the reading public, shaping readers as ‘prosumers’ who at once consume and manipulate content. Just as importantly, hyper-mediation and media convergence are forcing critics to confront an ‘unbinding of the book’ that began in practice decades before the Internet age. As professional mediators, editors occupy an ideal position to register the opportunities and the pressures of these processes, whether they are literary entrepreneurs or scholars implicated in literature as an institution. Their efforts to delimit literary texts and sell them as a particular kind of cultural institution show how the game of literature and its rules of play change shape under the pressures of new media configurations and new social worlds.