What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context

This chapter brings perspectives developed in the field of contextual and ubiquitous computing into contact with Rita Felski's application of Actor-Network Theory in literary studies in order to develop a conceptual approach to the question of context in works of ambient literature. For works of ambient literature, as they bring together the context created by the text of the work with the context given by the situation of the reader, they come to instantiate a third, hybrid context within which the experience of the work comes to be. Through a consideration of James Attlee's The Cartographer's Confession, a perspective on the nature of context in ambient literature is developed.