Real Virtualities and the Undead Genre

This chapter explores the provenance of the novel in our hypervisual and multimedia age. It argues that contemporary novels are now self-consciously intermedial in that they actively work into their formal structures and modes of address phenomenologies of apperception that far exceed the medium specificity of print. The chapter highlights the interplay of the verbal and the visual in the novels of Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Joe Sacco, Nadeem Aslam, and Kevin Powers and traces in them a new structure of address and a new orientation toward distant suffering and a wider circuit of mediating publics.