Introduction

Literature has changed. Clearly, crucial changes have been brought about by the growing influence of non-print formats such as e-books and podcasts, which have gained significant popularity fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, or the rise of digital platforms where literature is produced and disseminated. These developments have been registered, and their impact on literature has not been over-emphasized during the past decade. However, the landscape of literary production has been subtly but definitively affected (early signs of it are already emergent) by a body of literary texts that embrace multimodality in their core conceptual structure and creatively experiment with the potential of design to represent narrative content. This group of literary texts combines verbal (regular text) and non-verbal (photographic images, varied typography, maps, color, and so on) modes of representation as integral parts of their narratives, forming the genre of multimodal fiction. In doing so, they challenge conventions as regards the production and visual display of literature upon the page, and they interrogate years of practices in the publishing and literary industries.