The 2010s has seen an explosion of scholarship eulogizing the novel, as if the medium has been freshly murdered by the Internet and a generation of digital natives who refuse to read. The final pages of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: Science and the Reading Brain turn to panic as she wonders whether the vast benefits of reading will be extinguished, and the tone of Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography is nostalgic and mournful, capping sections on the evolution of the novel decades before the present day. In an increasingly complex media ecology, how can the novel survive as a leisure activity for a new generation, and a theoretical concept flexible enough to bridge old and new media?
This thesis aims to illuminate the continuities between the disparate outgrowths of the traditional print book and study the media consumption of young readers. The sum of this research shows that digital marauders have not, in fact, snuffed out novel reading. Reframing the novel through research and prototype iteration not as a static medium defined by form, content, or an imagined common origin point, but instead as a site of experience that engenders a unique co-creative relationship between reader and text, demonstrates how novel reading can endure.