With four primary aims, this thesis examines how premodern ideas from the European and Chinese traditions, particularly the concepts of authorship, mouvance, and textual variance, can reshape current scholarly conversations about authorship in the digital age. First, this thesis argues that modern conceptions of the author, especially the Romantic image of authorship, fail to accurately describe authorship in the digital age. Second, this thesis offers a counternarrative to the modern conceptions of authorship by drawing on the aforementioned premodern concepts to establish a new frame of reference, ultimately showing how digital authorship mirrors the premodern. Thirdly, this thesis demonstrates how due to the favoring of digital, serial form in contemporary Internet literature, specifically in the cases of English LitRPG webnovels, like the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman, and Chinese danmei [耽美] webnovels, like Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation [魔道祖师] by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (MXTX) [墨香铜臭], contemporary authorship ties into a long history of authors and readers collaboratively shaping works of literature. Finally, in addition to revealing the more fluid perception of authorship and the greater participatory nature of literature that is returning in the digital age in both Anglophone and Sinophone digital literary spaces, this thesis proposes a new framework for thinking about the relationship between authors and their readers, reframing their dynamic as symbiotic.

Selby, Hannah. “The Symbiotic Relationship of Readers and Writers in Digital Literary Spaces.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, May 2026. https://doi.org/10.46569/2v23w4894.