Abstract
Anecdotes are recast – indeed, spatialized – in digital environments. This chapter outlines a brief critical genealogy of the anecdote, and more specifically, its movement through literary history’s periphery to the center stage of New Historicism, and then through media studies and on to its mobilization – in the dual sense of movement and (political) use – in digital culture. Next, it traces the development of literary tourism and the place of the anecdote within it in order to establish a comparative media backdrop for the implication of digital anecdotes in the spatial and narrative imagination.
Anecdotes are recast in digital environments. This chapter outlines a brief critical genealogy of the anecdote, and more specifically, its movement through literary history’s periphery to the center stage of New Historicism, and then through media studies and on to its mobilization – in the dual sense of movement and political use – in digital culture. The anecdote has arguably served as a discrete textual form and “literary resource” since classical antiquity. In English, the earliest works to be characterized as resources for the literary tourist were “literary itineraries, which, whether intended for the armchair or the field, were often embellished with maps and plans documenting sights of either literary-biographical or purely imaginative significance”. The accessibility and portability of anecdotes underscored the concept of Dunedin’s dtour app from the start.