Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book places twenty-first-century U.S. literary fiction in conversation with concepts from the multi-disciplinary field of social network analysis. Through multiple vectors in the internet era, a vocabulary based on network structures has shaped contemporary conversations about individual and collective agency: reach, virality, backchanneling, grassroots networks, jobseeker networking, whisper networks, and the like. This book argues that key works of contemporary U.S. literary fiction engage critically with these ideas through both their themes and their form. It describes how authors orchestrate their fictional social worlds as “character networks,” wherein characters’ roles are often explicitly defined by their social positioning, such as privileged access, various forms of exclusion, and brokerage positions between disconnected groups. The book borrows from sociology, anthropology, and other fields in describing and illustrating the structures of contemporary fiction’s character networks and roles therein. It argues that contemporary literary fiction is especially well suited to exploring how individual and collective power is shaped by social positioning, in chapters on network-oriented reading practices, privacy and surveillance, networking and cultural appropriation, and the democratic grassroots network. In each chapter this book reconsiders character roundness, privacy, authenticity, and agency as fundamentally social phenomena. Taken together, the chapters develop an account of the socially networked dimensions of literary character and their key roles in contemporary U.S. fiction.</jats:p>