‘Swiping right on the media novel’ – Interview with Dong Xia and Sandro Eich, Guest Editors of ‘Novel Media/Media Novel’ for C21 Literature

Description

During their shared time as doctoral candidates at the University of St Andrews, Dr Dong Xia and Dr Sandro Eich came up with the idea of a collection of essays on the relationship between digital media and contemporary fiction, and proposed a special issue of C21 Literature in 2023.

Two years and two doctorates later, ‘Novel Media / Media Novel’ was published in November 2025. Dong is currently the Postdoctoral Researcher in New Media and Digital Culture at Leiden University in the research project ‘Contagious Digitalities’ and Sandro works as Academic Policy Officer for the University of St Andrews. In this interview, they share how they had the idea for this special issue and what it means that digital media has found its way into the literary imagination of the twenty-first century.