CounterText is uniquely centred on the study of literature and its 21st-century extensions. Is literature what it used to be? Are the broader resonances of the literary being overtaken in the drifts towards image cultures, digital spaces, globalisation and technoscientific advances? Or might the literary simply be elsewhere? CounterText seeks and commissions contributions that explore this fluid 'post-literary' reality in its various forms and challenges.
For CounterText, the post-literary is the domain in which any artefact that might have some claim on the literary appears. Inevitably, most of these artefacts will conform to familiar manifestations of the literary, doing little to reconfigure cultural givens and accepted notions of textuality. However, the post-literary domain also allows for vital and challenging migrations and mutations of the literary. Such artefacts might be called 'countertextual'. The countertextual is strategic, energetic, metamorphic and revelatory of the charged evolutions and radical transformations of the literary today.
Fully peer-reviewed, CounterText seeks to explore this perspective on the literary in the 21st century. The journal is informed by perspectives derived from literary criticism, cultural criticism, philosophy and political theory, with a particular interest in studying technology’s reshaping of literary and post-literary cultures.
