Video Recording: Understanding Webnovels: From Disruptive Publishing to Transcultural Storytelling

Webnovels are born-digital, serialised user-generated-stories, mostly genre fiction, emerged as a disruptive model for literary publishing since the late 1990s. The past decades saw robust industrialisation and internationalisation of webnovels, as well as wide dissemination of translated Asian webnovels across multiple platforms. In this talk Dr Tony Ren, an expert in digital publishing, will share his research on webnovels and explore the emergent trends of online creative writing, social reading and digital publishing. Dr Ren will present some big data research findings, drawing on over 4,000 webnovel titles translated from Chinese to English and their reading metrics. His presentation will map the transnational flow of popular digital literature, examine key features of webnovel stories, and highlight some communicative and cultural shifts. How writers, transcreators and fans engage in a transcultural and participatory sphere of storytelling and what it means for the Global-China cultural interactions in a digital context will also be discussed.