Today the rise of electronic media poses important challenges to print culture. Beginning in 1990, a series of books and studies has tracked the impending “death of literature,” linking its demise to social trends such as the democratization of the university and, increasingly, to technological developments, notably the rise of the World Wide Web. These critics characteristically employ the most restrictive definition of “literature,” limiting it to poetry, drama (in a book, not on the stage), and, above all, the novel. The novel has special status for these writers, who often take it to be the paradigmatic literary form because of its length, the “linear” reading that it encourages, and the solitude and consequent richness of subjectivity that novel-reading is supposed to produce. They trace certain forms of social order and cultural organization to widespread engagement with “the literary,” in this narrow definition (Birkerts 1994; Edmundson 2004).

This is an excerpt from Sandra M. Gustafson’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 148).