Ambient Stories in Practice and Research

Amy Spencer was a post-doctoral research fellow in Ambient Literature at the University of the West of England, UK and is now post-doctoral research assistant at Bath Spa University, UK. She has a PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College where her thesis, Author, Reader, Text: Collaboration and the Networked Book, focused on collaborative authorship in digital literature. She also has an MA in English from King’s College London. Amy is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction and is the author of DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture.

• Introduction: Ambient Stories: Embodied, authored and unpredictable, Amy Spencer 1. Retrospect on the new epigraphy: Walking, reading and marking the city, Malcolm McCullough2. Ambient writing in a terrain of threatened subjectivity: Unfolding codes, tainted models and holey spaces, Phil Smith 3. Ambient activism: Place, people and process, Donna Hancox4. Dear Reader, can I borrow your body to tell a story?: On ambient interactional metalepsis, sylleptic readers and palimpsestuous embedded reading experiences of ambient stories, Agnieszka Przybyszewska5. At the edges: A question of audience invisibility, disappearance and failure, Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley and Lee Miller 6. Here. Now. Ours: Interrogating the use of situated augmented reality, Ben Gwalchmai7. On writing instability: How ambient literature reconfigures the reader/ writer relationship in situated storytelling , Tom Abba8. Persephone’s Footsteps: Storymaking on foot, Claire Dean9. Waveform: Writing across oceans, air and algorithms, Richard A CarterBibliography

This is an extremely timely book. Narrative experiences are increasingly locative and enabled by mobile technologies. This volume adds a much needed range of perspectives in this area of research, exploring works via cross-disciplinary theories, methods, and practices.