Amateur Creativity: Contemporary Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene

This essay shows how digital publishing practices are changing the field of contemporary literature. It identifies an overlooked intersection between strategies of amateur creativity and professional literary production across print and digital mediums. Strategies of amateur creativity (a category coined by Lawrence Lessig) include self-publishing stories, novels, and poetry, participating in online writing communities, and using social media platforms to share work. Such online behavior fosters a global popular culture that is, I argue, reshaping traditional literary categories like authorship and canonicity as well as institutions like the publishing house. The essay brings scholarship on fandom, digital sharing economies, and media studies into conversation with literary studies to explain how internet cultures of amateurism alter definitional accounts of artistic works as both commodities and gifts. It further shows how changing conceptions of literary ownership and distribution inform a range of contemporary writers’ experiments with the formal composition of their works, anonymous publishing, and promotion. Writers addressed include Margaret Atwood, Elena Ferrante, Wu Ming, Cory Doctorow, and Lauren Beukes.