Relaunching the Print Novel: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

Since its publication in 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski’s (2000a) House of Leaves has attracted significant attention from critics, fans, and academics to the point that the novel is now canonized in contemporary literature although it retains its cult status. Within the bounds of the print book medium, House of Leaves has reconceptualized narrative possibilities for literary texts at the turn of the century, and has inspired authors and artists to explore uncharted avenues in literary writing ever since. Brimming with elaborate typography and inventive page layout, Danielewski’s magnum opus novel interrogated established practices of book design and typesetting and refocused them to narrative ends. In Multimodal Poetics in Contemporary Fiction, I approach House of Leaves as the literary text that inaugurated the genre of multimodal fiction, and view Danielewski’s experimentation as an indicator of fresh dynamics for print-based writing in the digital age which paved the way for more experiments with multimodality to emerge in literary narratives.