The Persistence of Genius: The Case for Stuart Moulthrop's "Victory Garden," by Dene Grigar
“While it would not be accurate to say that the hypertext novel was completely abandoned by the first decade of the 21st century, it is the case that link-and-node hypertext would no longer be the dominant mode of literary experimentation in digital media"—Scott Rettberg, “The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?”
In his essay, “The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?,” Scott Rettberg discusses the impact of hypertext fiction before the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web, arguing that the "link and node hypertext" approach represented by early stand alone software like Storyspace was “eclipsed . . . by a range of other digital narrative forms” (Rettberg, “The American Hypertext Novel”). His essay goes on to reference important examples of hypertext fiction––Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (featured in Chapter 1 of this book) as well as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. Of these, both Joyce’s and Jackson’s novels are still accessible to the reading public; Moulthrop’s is not. As a digital preservationist of interactive media whose mission it is to maintain public access to our literary and cultural heritage, the question I ask myself is, “Has the lack of accessibility to Moulthrop’s novel affected research about it?”
The answer is no. Over the last 27 years since its publication, the novel has been the subject of 100 books, essays, and theses and dissertations, close to 40% of these during the last 13 years. Ironically, Victory Garden has not been readily accessible to the public since the shift to 64-bit computing in the early 2000s and rise of mobile media in the late 2000s. Originally published in 1991 on a 3.5-inch floppy disk for the Macintosh platform and re-released in subsequent years for the Windows platform and, finally, in 2002 on CD-ROM for Macintosh computers running the Classic and PCs running Windows operating systems, Victory Garden has not been migrated or emulated for contemporary computers. If my study of the 13 editions of Joyce’s afternoon, a story sheds light on the challenges of keeping a work alive amid technological innovation, [1] then this study of the critical response to Moulthrop’s Victory Garden reveals the way in which a work lives on despite the lack of accessibility to it.Methodology for This Study & Findings
My study focuses on critical writing that grapples with the novel, like Alice Bell’s essay "Interrupting the Transmission: The Slippery Worlds of Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden" from her book, The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction, and avoids those in which the work was simply mentioned, like Belinda Barnet’s Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext. It also avoids writing by Moulthrop himself, with the exception of the book the two of us co-authored where I discuss the work in the chapters that I write.My data collection began with a search of ELMCIP for critical works about the novel. Finding 58 writings at this important database Rettberg developed for the field of electronic literature, I turned my attention to a more general search of Google Scholar, where I found an additional 42 critical writings not mentioned in ELMCIP. I combined the findings from the two sites and organized the information chronologically starting with the first scholarly work that appeared in 1992. From there I culled the list of those works listed as addressing Victory Garden but didn’t, like Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age. [2] My final step was to conduct a search of WorldCat and ArticleFirst and check my list against works found in these databases. The result was that I collected 100 critical writings focused on Victory Garden from 1992-2019.
The list reveals three trends that underscore the work’s impact on both literary criticism and critical theory. These include: 1) a persistence in publishing activity about the work despite its inaccessibility, 2) a diverse publication audience for the work, and 3) its wide geographical reach.
Persistence in Publishing Activity
A look at the list (below) shows that Victory Garden has been written about every year since its publication, despite the fact that it has been essentially out of circulation since the mid 2000s. In fact, it has never not been a topic of scholarly discourse over its 27-year history.The first scholarly work about the novel was published barely a year after Victory Garden's release, an essay by J Yellowlees Douglas, entitled "What Hypertext Can do that Print Narratives Cannot." In 1993 five essays appeared. In 1994, there were two. In 1995, two more essays and the first masters thesis appeared. This trend continues during the rise of the World Wide Web and use of Flash software for digital narratives that Rettberg references in his essay, roughly the years 1995 to 2007. Despite these technological innovations, a look at the publishing history of critical writings during 2001 reveals nine books, essays, and theses published. What is interesting about that particular year is that Victory Garden had not yet been migrated to CD-ROM technology and, so, was still being accessed via floppy disk, yet the floppy disk drive had become moribund three years before for Macintosh computers and were becoming increasingly rare for PCs.
In 2002 the novel was released on CD-ROM, resulting in five more scholarly works published in 2003 and 2004, three PhD dissertations in 2005, and seven more critical writings from 2006-2007. The demise of CD-ROM drives began in 2007 for Macintosh computers at the same time the Apple Corporation moved away from the Classic operating system to MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard). These changes meant that Victory Garden, along with other hypertext works published by Eastgate Systems, Inc., would no longer be accessible on contemporary Macintosh computers unless migrated to the new operating system and formats. Joyce's and Jackson's were; Moulthrop's work was not. Scholars with PCs could continue to study Victory Garden until 2015 when PCs moved to 64-bit computing. Despite these constraints, publications about the novel continued. In 2008 two books and one dissertation appeared. In 2009 there were six scholarly writings. In 2010, there were four. Between 2011 and 2015 there were 21 books, essays, and theses and dissertations produced about Victory Garden.
Considering that Victory Garden was by 2016 accessible only to scholars with legacy hardware, scholarly writing about the work continued. That year Christos Karras' exhibition, which featured Victory Garden, was reviewed by Renata Elizabetta Ntelia in CounterText in a special issue entitled "Electronic Literature, Again." In 2017 my own book co-authored with Moulthrop for The MIT Press, Traversals, was released. In 2018 Astrid Ensslin and Lyle Skains wrote about the work in their essay, "Hypertext: Storyspace to Twine." Finally in 2019, Rettberg's book, Electronic Literature, was released; Domanic Garcia's essay, "Techniques for a Possible Handling of Ethics in a Post-truth Culture" for the collection, Rethinking Ethics Through Hypertext came out; and Ana Abril Hernández's thesis at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid was published.
For a work that has been out of reach to scholars––as Victory Garden certainly currently has been––to have persisted through time as an object of scholarly study should put to rest any question about interest about the work or demand for it. In fact, as the subject of 24 masters theses and PhD dissertations, beginning with Jon Bridges’ thesis, “Hypertext and Literature: Facts and Fictions,” at Massy University in New Zealand in 1995, it is clear that the novel is recognized by scholars as an important pioneering work, one of great interest by scholars. That some of the major digital scholars and artists working today wrote their theses and dissertations on Victory Garden, including Raine Koskimaa, Jill Walker Rettberg, Anna Gunder, Donna Leishman, Cheryl Ball, Serge Bouchardon, Maria Engberg, Hans Kristian Rustad, Markuu Eskelinen, Álvaro Seiça, and Anaïs Guilet, speaks to the fact that it has contributed to birth of and continues to breed scholars in the field.
Diverse Publication Audience
The 100+ scholars writing about Victory Garden published in a wide range of venues about the work, from mainstream and scholarly presses and across many different disciplines. As mentioned previously, the first essay published about the novel––J Yellowlees Douglas’ "What Hypertexts Can Do That Print Narratives Cannot"––appeared in Reader. A year later, in 1993 Robert Coover, who had raised awareness of hypertext literature the year before with his provocatively titled “The End of Books” for The New York Times Review of Books, [3] wrote about Victory Garden in The New York Times in an essay called “Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer.” Along with these, we see essays addressing the novel in the proceedings for ACM’s Hypertext ’93 and the journal, The Drama Review. The former is a publication for scholars interested in computer technology, specifically hypertext systems, while the latter focuses on performance and the arts. Certainly a wide range of audiences and academic interests are exemplified by these various publications.In 1995 Robert Kendall published "Writing for the New Millennium: The Birth of Electronic Literature" in Poets & Writers Magazine and Kip Strasma published a paper in the proceedings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a conference frequented by composition instructors. The watershed year for hypertext literature was 1997 when four major books about hypertext literature came out. Of these Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, and Silvio Gaggi’s From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media addressed Victory Garden. Murray calls the novel “ambitious” and recognizes the connection between navigation and the “dramatic enactment of the plot” (82-83). Aarseth studied it, along with 22 other texts––ranging from afternoon, a story to Eliza, to Pale Fire, to the I Ching––to determine the typological approach of each (65-75). The debate that arose between Murray and Aarseth regarding narratology and ludology and the fact that Victory Garden could reflect both stances shows the breadth of the work's audience in the face of their conflicting theoretical foundations.
The most prevalent journals for Moulthrop’s novel—and many other hypertext literary works––are those associated with ACM conferences and workshops. A total of 10 essays on Victory Garden have been published since Mark Bernstein’s two for Hypertext ’93 and the European Conference on Hypertext (ECHT). In fact, he authored or co-authored five of the 10 essays published by ACM. His influential, “Patterns of Hypertext,” published in Hypertext '98: Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, notably classifies the pattern found in Victory Garden as the “navigational feint”––that is, “a navigational opportunity that is not meant to be followed immediately” but can be “pursued in the future” (Bernstein, “Patterns”).
In 1999 the work was discussed in essays for The English Journal, a publication sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English, and Works and Days, known as a “scholarly forum for the exploration of problems in cultural studies, pedagogy, and institutional critique” ("Home") for scholars in humanities and social sciences. The next year the novel was the focus of essays for Contemporary Literature and the new online journal founded by Robert Simanowski, Dichtung Digital, and IEEE Multimedia, the scientific journal published by the IEEE Computer Society.
2001 brought the 2nd edition of Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Moulthrop’s novel had come out after the 1st edition of Bolter's book, but Victory Garden appears in the 2nd and is referred to as “another of the most important early hypertexts” (130). Markuu Eskelinen’s essay for Electronic Book Review, which came out that same year, echoes this sentiment when he calls Victory Garden “outstanding.” Other important publications in 2001 include Rita Raley’s essay for Postmodern Culture, Anja Rau’s for the Journal of Digital Information, and two essays for Hypertext '01: Proceedings for the 2001 ACM Hypertext Conference.
Over the next two decades the novel continued to show up in publications for the digital humanities, literary studies, comparative literature, poetics, new media, and hypertext studies. Additionally from 2001 to 2020 a total 11 monographs were published that addressed the novel, eight of which during the time Victory Garden was becoming more and more difficult to access. What is clear is that though the novel is categorized narrowly as hypertext fiction, it has been of interest in a broad range of audiences, far beyond those focused solely on hypertext.
Wide Geographical Reach
Finally, the work has reached a broad international audience. Starting with the 24 theses and dissertations, we see that Victory Garden reached scholars in New Zealand, England, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Scotland, the U.S., France, Hungary, Australia, Portugal, and Spain over the last 27 years. Books and essays have been produced by scholars from these countries, as well as from China, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, Bulgaria, Poland, and Mexico. Though Rettberg refers to Victory Garden as an "American hypertext novel," its geographical reach ranges well beyond the U.S. borders and across the globe to four continents.Conclusion
When Victory Garden was exhibited for the Library of Congress's Electronic Literature & Its Emerging Forms in 2013, [4] Moulthrop provided the curators with a description for the exhibit didactics and archival website. He wrote in his usual self-deprecating tone:[Victory Garden] was originally intended for the first-generation Apple Macintosh, with its monochrome (but multi-font!) screen whose size would these days suggest a dashboard nav system. This was long in advance of e-books and tablets, and shortly before Myst, Doom, and Netscape Navigator unleashed their graphics revolutions; in a brief, fragile, twilight of the word.
But has it really been the word's "twilight?" Is Henning Ziegler correct when he suggested in 2002 that hypertexts like Moulthrop's––that is, digital works that rely heavily on the word––have become "uncool" (Ziegler) and no longer resonate in the 21st century despite Coover's prediction that it would be literature's future (1992)?
Looking at the visual arts for an answer, I do not see museums and galleries ignoring artistic works from movements no longer practiced today. Despite the fact there are a dearth of contemporary visual artists saying they work in Cubism, there have been five Picasso exhibitions scheduled in 2020 in the U.S., Germany, Canada, and Austria of this Cubist's art. The study of Cubism persists not because contemporary artists are still practicing it, but because those who did broke new ground and gave birth to a new way of thinking. Picasso has been dead for 47 years, but his work that excited the public and influenced art over 100 years ago lives on as an exemplar of human creative expression. By the same token, to suggest that because literary artists have moved on to other literary forms and techniques does not mean that the forms and techniques previously pioneered are no longer important or worthy of continued interest. Gertrude Stein herself opined about the lack of a wide readership during her lifetime, [5] but what scholars among us today do not recognize this artist's contributions? Rather, it is precisely because Picasso and Stein impacted the present, continue to ignite, excite, perplex, and challenge that scholars still engage with them. How else can we possibly explain why Victory Garden is still the object of study of scholarly works a full decade since becoming inaccessible to the public? Rettberg was correct with his assertion that the kind of hypertext Victory Garden represents is no longer "the dominant mode of literary experimentation in digital media" (Rettberg, "American Novel"), but what we scholars need to wrap our minds around––those of us who study born digital literature––is that genius is not found in any shiny new thing we access through our mobile devices, experience via VR, or interact with using whatever technology that arises in our lifetimes. It lies instead those works imbued by the artist's creative expression that move us to see a different way, to think a different thought, to inspire us to be different. If that is what cool means, then for that reason works like Moulthrop's is that.
Notes
[1] See the event and exhibition of Joyce’s afternoon, a story, “An Afternoon with Afternoon,” documented in Chapter 1 of this book and at https://dtc-wsuv.org/afternoon-with-afternoon/index.html.[2] Some works listed in the various databases I consulted like Readers are no longer available and so cannot be verified. In cases like this, I rely on the work of previous scholars and welcome assistance from anyone who can assist me with fine tuning my list.
[3] See Robert Coover’s "The End of Books." The New York Times Book Review. 21 June 1992. Online: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html.
[4] This exhibition was curated by Kathi Inman Berens and me on 3-5 April 13. See http://dtc-wsuv.org/elit/elit-loc/welcome-to-electronic-literature-its-emerging-forms/.
[5] See Kali McKay's "Gertrude Stein and Her Audience: Small Presses, Little Magazines, and the Reconfiguration of Modern Authorship."
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/185287365.pdf.
List of Scholarly Writings about Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden
1992
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. "What Hypertexts Can Do That Print Narratives Cannot." Reader 28 (Fall 1992): 1-19. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88.3632&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
1993
Bernstein, Mark. "Enactment in Information Farming." Hypertext '93: Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Hypertext. December 1993, 242–249. https://doi.org/10.1145/168750.168837.
Bernstein, Mark, Michael Joyce, and David Levine. "Contours of Constructive Hypertexts." ECHT '92: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext. December 1993, 161–170. https://doi.org/10.1145/168466.168517.
Coover, Robert. "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer." The New York Times. August 29, 1993. Vol. CXLIII, No. 49, 496. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-hyperfiction.html.
Douglas, J Yellowlees. "Where the Senses Become a Stage and Reading is Direction: Performing the Texts of Virtual Reality and Interactive Fiction." The Drama Review 37.4 (1993): 18-37. https://doi.org/10.2307/1146290.
Gess, Richard. "Magister Macintosh: Shuffled Notes on Hypertext Writing." The Drama Review 37.4 (1993): 38-44. https://doi.org/10.2307/1146291.
1994
Bikerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Digital Age. NY, NY: Fawcett Columbine, 1994.
Dunn, John. "Hyperfiction Moulthrop's Computer Novel Weaves a Web of Alternative Endings." George Tech Alumni Magazine Online 71.1 (1994).
Schmundt, Hilmar. "Autor ex Machina: Electronic Hyperfictions: Utopian Poststructuralism and the Romanticism of the Computer Age." AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 19.2 (1994): 223-246. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43023678.
1995
Bridges, Jon S. "Hypertext and Literature: Facts and Fictions." MA Thesis. Massey University. 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/10698.
Kendall, Robert. "Writing for the New Millenium: The Birth of Electronic Literature." Poets & Writers Magazine. Nov./Dec. 1995.
Strasma, Kip. "A Rhetoric for Hypertext Links: Connections to, within, and beyond Hypertext Nodes." Proceedings for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. March 23, 1995.
1996
Travis, Molly Abel. "Cybernetic Esthetics, Hypertext and the Future of Literature." Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 29.4 (December 1996): 115-129.
1997
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives of Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Bolter, Jay David. "The Rhetoric of Interactive Fiction." Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation. Ed. Philip G. Cohen. NY, NY: Routledge Press, 1997.
Gaggi, Silvio. From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Klastrup, Lisbeth. "Hyperizons: A study of interactive reading and readership in hyperfiction theory and practice, with an outlook to hyperfictions' future inspired by the reading of Sophie's World and The Pandora Directive." MA Thesis, University of Kent, 1997.
Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. NY, NY: Free Press, 1997.
1998
Bernstein, Mark. "Pattern of Hypertext." Hypertext '98: Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. May 1998, 21-29. https://doi.org/10.1145/276627.276630. Reprinted at https://www.eastgate.com/patterns/Print.html.
Bolter, J. D. "Hypertext and the Question of Visual Literacy." Handbook of Literacy and Technology: Transformations in a Post-Typographical World. Ed. D. Reinking, M. C. McKenna?, L. D. Labbo, & R. D. Kieffer. Mahwah, MJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 3-13.
1999
Bernstein, Mark. "Structural Patterns and Hypertext Rhetoric." ACM Computing Surveys. December 1999. https://doi.org/10.1145/345966.346011.
Calvi, Licia. "'Lector in Rebus': The Role of the Reader and the Characteristics of Hyperreading." Hypertext '99: The Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. February 1999, 101–109. https://doi.org/10.1145/294469.294495.
Civello, Catherine A. "'Move over, Please': The Decentralization of the Teacher in the Computer-Based Classroom." The English Journal. 88.4 (Mar. 1999): 89-94. https://doi.org/10.2307/822426.
Keep, Christopher. "The Disturbing Liveliness of Machines: Rethinking the Body in Hypertext Theory and Fiction." Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. 164-181.
Phelan, James and Edward Maloney. "Authors, Readers, and Progression in Hypertext Narrative." Works and Days. Vol.17 &18, 1999.
2000
Douglas, J Yellowlees. The End of Books--or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Douglas, J Yellowlees and Andrew Hargadon. "The Pleasure Principle: Immersion, Engagement, Flow." Hypertext '00: Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM on Hypertext and Hypermedia. May 2000, 153–160. https://doi.org/10.1145/336296.336354.
Eskelinen, Markku and Raine Koskimaa. Cybertext Yearbook 2000. Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä, 2000.
Koskimaa, Raine. "Digital Literature: From Text To Hypertext And Beyond (Michael Joyce, Shelley Jackson, Stuart Moulthrop)." PhD Dissertation. University of Jyväskylä, 2000.
---. "Reading Victory Garden." Dictung-Digital. September 2000. http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2000/Koskimaa-12-Sep/.
A. D. Malmud, "Tech(xt)s [links between text and technology]." IEEE MultiMedia, 7.4 (Dec. 2000): 6-9. https://doi.org/10.1109/93.895148.
Selig, Robert L. "The Endless Reading of Fiction: Stuart Moulthrop's Hypertext Novel Victory Garden." Contemporary Literature 41.4 (Winter 2000): 642-660. https://doi.org/10.2307/1209006.
Suter, Beat. Hyperfiktion und interaktive Narration. Zurich, CH: Update Verlag, 2000.
2001
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Asscociates, Publishers, 2001. Eskelinen, Markku. "Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying." Electronic Book Review. 2001. http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/cybertext-theory-what-an-english-professor-should-know-before-trying/.
Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2001.
Hedqvist, Sven. "Aristoteles och Hypertextromanen – Om uppbyggnad, sammankoppling, överblick och motivation i Stuart Moulthrops fiktiva hypertext Victory Garden." Thesis. Umeå University, 2001.
Jensen, Nikolaj. "Internet Hyperfiction: Can It Ever Become a Widely Popular Artform?." MA Thesis. University of Copenhagen, 2001.
Kouper, Inna. "Out of Nothing: In-Depth Hyperfiction Study." Hypertext '01: Proceedings for the 2001 ACM Hypertext Conference. September 2001, 71-72. https://doi.org/10.1145/504216.504238.
Raley, Rita. "Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance." Postmodern Culture 12.1 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2001.0023.
Rau, Anja. "Wreader’s Digest—How to Appreciate Hyperfiction." Journal of Digital Information 1.7 (2001). https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/28.
Weal, Mark J., David E. Millard, Danius Michaelides, and David C. De Roure. "Building Narrative Structures Using Context Based Linking." Hypertext '01: Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. September 2001, 37–38. https://doi.org/10.1145/504216.504231.
2002
Bernstein, Mark. "Storyspace 1." Hypertext '02: Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. June 2002, 172–181. https://doi.org/10.1145/513338.513383.
Wong, Mou-Lan. "The Garden of Living Paths: Interactive Narratives in Global Geek Culture." Digitalizing The Global Text. Ed. Paul Allen Miller. National Taiwan University and the University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
2003
Goicoechea, Maria. "Reading Cyborgs." Internet in Linguistics, Translation and Literary Studies. Ed. Santiago Posteguillo et al. Universitat Jaume, 2003. 71-88.
Johnston, John. "Vectors of the Virtual in New Media Theory." L'Esprit Créateur. 43.2 (Summer 2003): 92-104. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2010.0383.
Koskimaa, Raine. "In Search of Califia." Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature. Ed. Jan van Looy and Jan Baetens, 53—67, 2003.
Rettberg, Jill Walker. "Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World." PhD Dissertation. University of Bergen, 2003.
Ziegler, Henning. "When Hypertext Became Uncool: Notes on Power, Politics, and the Interface." Dichtung Digital 2003. http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/issue/1/ziegler/.
2004
Gunder, Anna. "Hyperworks: On Digital Literature and Computer Games." PhD Dissertation. Uppsala University, 2004.
Leishman, Donna. "Creating Screen-Based Multiple State Environments: Investigating Systems of Confutation." PhD Dissertation. Glasgow School of Art, 2004.
Peacocke, Sharyn. "Hypertext & The Encoding Of Meaning." October 2004. http://peacockepress.com/SharynPeacocke/Hypertext-Encoding.html.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps." Dichtung Digital. 2004. http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2004/1/Ryan/index.htm.
---. "Multivariant Narratives." A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Malden, MA, 2004. 415-430.
2005
Ball, Cheryl. "A New Media Reading Strategy." PhD Dissertation. Michigan Technological University, 2005.
Bouchardon, Serge. Le récit littéraire interactif. Narrativité et interactivité. PhD Dissertation. The University of Compiègne, 2005.
Maloney, Edward. "Footnotes in Fiction: A Rhetorical Approach." PhD Dissertation. Ohio State University, 2005.
2006
Sassón-Henry, Perla. "Chaos Theory, Hypertext, and Reading Borges and Moulthrop." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 8.1 (2006): https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1289.
2007
Ciccoricco, David. "Tending the Garden Plot: Moulthrop's Victory Garden." Reading Network Fiction. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama Press, 2007. 94-123.
Engberg, Maria. "Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media." PhD Dissertation. Uppsala University, 2007.
Ensslin, Astrid. Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions. London, UK: Continuum Press, 2007.
Fizek, Sonia. "Multimodality in the context of cyberliterature—have the new electronic media revolutionized a narrative." Online Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). 2007. http://pala.ac.uk./2007.html.
Glavanakova, Alexandra. Reading America Hypertextually. 2007. https://research.uni-sofia.bg/handle/10506/1244.
Szűts, Zoltán. "Szellem a gépben. A hypertext." PhD Dissertation. Eötvös Loránd University, 2007.
2008
Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Rustad, Hans Kristian. "Tekstspill i hypertekst. Koherensopplevelse og sjangergjenkjennelse i lesing av multimodale hyperfiksjoner." PhD Dissertation. University of Agder, 2008.
Zenner, Roman. Hypertextual Fiction on the Internet: A Structural and Narratological Analysis. Saarbrücken VDM Verlag Dr. Müller 2008.
2009
Eskelinen, Markku. "Travels in Cybertextuality: The Challenge of Ergodic Literature and Ludology to Literary Theory." PhD Dissertation. University of Jyväskylä, 2009.
Harpold, Terry. Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Hutchinson, Andrew. "Techno-historical Limits of the Interface: The Performance of Interactive Narrative Experiences." PhD Dissertation. Curtin University, 2009.
Kolb, David A. "Making Revisions Hyper-visible." Hypertext '08: Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. June 2008, 113–116. https://doi.org/10.1145/1379092.1379115.
Marshall, Catherine C. "Reading and Writing the Electronic Book." Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. Morgan & Williston, VT: Claypool Publishers, 2009. https://doi.org/10.2200/S00215ED1V01Y200907ICR009.
Wilhelmsson, Per. "Dynamic Interactive Storytelling in Computer Games." MS Thesis. Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, 2009. http://kiosk.nada.kth.se/utbildning/grukth/exjobb/rapportlistor/2009/rapporter09/wilhelmsson_per_09036.pdf.
2010
Bell Alice. "Interrupting the Transmission: The Slippery Worlds of Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden." The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. 2010. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281288_4.
Bennett, Guy. « Ce livre qui n'en est pas un : le texte littéraire électronique » Littérature 160.4 (2010): 37-43.
Chunlu, Cai. "Victory Garden: A Cyber Labyrinth." Contemporary Foreign Literature. 2010-03. http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTotal-DDWW201003019.htm.
Wood, Rulon Matley. "Hypertext and Ethnographic Representation: A Case Study." PhD Dissertation, University of Utah, 2011.
2011
Bell, Alice. "Ontological Boundaries and Methodological Leaps: The Importance of Possible Worlds Theory for Hypertext Fiction (and Beyond)." New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age. Ed. Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 63-82.
---. The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. NY, NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2010.
Bell, Alice and Astrid Ensslin. "'I know what it was. You know what it was': Second-Person Narration in Hypertext Fiction." Narrative 19.3 (October 2011): 311-329.
Branny-Jankowska. Emilia. "Rytm jako kategoria opisu e-literatury." Liberatura, e-literatura i...Remiksy, remediacje, redefinicje. Ed. Monika Górska Olesińska, 2011.
Seiça, Álvaro. "Transdução: Processos de Transferência na Literatura e Arte Digitais." MA Thesis. Universidade de Évora, 2011.
Sena Felippe, Mara Alice. "Leituras e Leitores: textos e hipertextos diante das práticas do virtual." 2011. http://www.bdtd.ufjf.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=1134.
Tyrkkö, Jukka. "Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives." PhD Dissertation. University of Helsinki, 2011.
2012
Abba, Tom. "Archiving Digital Narrative: Some Issues." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 18.2 (2012): 121-125. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856511433687.
Fagerjord, Anders. "Design som medievitenskapelig metode." Norsk Medietidsskrift. 19.3 (2012): 198-215.
Gray, Michael E. "Reading Ineffability and Realizing Tragedy in Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden." MA Thesis. Western Kentucky University, 2012. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1188/.
Nack, Frank and Annika Waern. "Mobile Digital Interactive Storytelling—a winding path." New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 18.1-2 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2011.641418.
Seiça, Álvaro. "E-Borges: Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden." Op. Cit.: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies 2.1 (2012):130 -141. http://hdl.handle.net/1956/8952.
2013
Bell, Alice. "Unnatural Narrative in Hypertext Fiction." 2013. https://tinyurl.com/y4rkhxln.
De Vecchi Espinosa de los Monteros, Bruno F. "La imagen en la novel hipertextual electronica: el caso de Stuart Moulthrop." DeSignis 21 (2013): 62-71.
Guilet, Anaïs. "Pour une littérature cyborg : l'hybridation médiatique du texte littéraire." PhD Dissertation. Université of Poitiers, 2013.
Kolb, David. "Narrative Hypertext, On the Level." Hypertext '13: The Proceedings of the Third Narrative and Hypertext Workshop. May 2013, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/2462216.2462219.
Sassón-Henry, Perla. Golpe De Gracia: Más Allá De La Trama. Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2013.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. "Reading Digital Literature: Surface, Data, Interaction, and Expressive Processing." A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2013. 163-182.
2014
Galvanakova, Alexandra. "Linking Spaces in the Cybertext Novel." 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10506/1247.
Swift, Elizabeth. "The Hypertextual Experience: Digital Narratives, Spectator, Performance." PhD Thesis. University of Exeter, 2014. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/16025.
2015
Ciccoricco, David. Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
Rettberg, Scott. "The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?" Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice. Ed. Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen, and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen. NY, NY: Routledge Press, 2015. Reprinted at: http://art.colorado.edu/df/Rettberg.pdf.
Zimmerman, Heiko. Autorschaft und digitale Literatur: Geschichte, Medienpraxis und Theoriebildung. Trier WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 2015.
2016
Ntelia, Renata Elizabetta. Review of "Digital Revolution," curated by Christos Karras. CounterText 2.2 (Aug 2016): 263-267.
2017
Mouthrop, Stuart and Dene Grigar. Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
2018
Ensslin, Astrid and Lyle Skains. "Hypertext: Storyspace to Twine." The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. Ed. Joseph Tabbi. NY, NY: Bloombury Academic, 295-309.
2019
Garcia, Domanic. "Techniques for a Possible Handling of Ethics in a Post-truth Culture." Rethinking Ethics Through Hypertext, Emerald Publoshing Limited. (2019): 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-425-020191003.
Hernández, Ana Abril. "Narrativas laberínticasestudio semiótico del laberinto en Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges y Stuart Moulthrop." Thesis. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2019.
Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019.