Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities

<p>How can we use digital media to understand reading editing and writing as literary processes? How can we design the digital medium in a way that goes beyond the printed codex? This book is an attempt to answer those fundamental questions by bringing together a new theory of literary studies with a highly dynamic digital environment. <p/>Using the digital archive of the modernist masterpiece <i>Book of Disquiet</i> by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) as case study and site for simulation and practical experiment <i>Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities </i>demonstrates how computational approaches to texts can fully engage with the complexities of contemporary literary theory. Manuel Portela marshals a unique combination of theoretical speculation literary analysis and human imagination in what amounts to a significant critical intervention and a key advance in the use of digital methods to rethink the processes of reading and writing literature. <p/>The foregrounding of the foundational practices of reading editing and writing will be relevant for several fields including literary studies scholarly editing software studies and digital humanities.</p>