Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature

The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature provides an invaluable resource for those interested in deepening their understanding of the variety of theories and approaches available when AI is studied or deployed in literary contexts. It also illustrates ways in which AI researchers can use literary lenses to better understand the sociotechnical dynamics and cultural imaginaries shaping human interactions with AI.

Both AI and literature are understood in their broadest senses here. The book incorporates chapters that deal with Large Language Models, Generative AI, transformer architectures, story generators, and computational analysis. Literary case studies embrace performance, poetry, comics, as well as prose, and span a wide range of historical periods, from the ancient world to contemporary science fiction and Generative AI poetry.

The Handbook brings together early career contributors, as well as some of the best-known names in the digital humanities and computational literary studies. It offers a fresh perspective on the past, present, and future of AI and literature that will appeal to students and scholars with relevant interests across a range of subjects, including AI Engineering, Classics, Computing, Digital Humanities, English, Ethics, Film and Television, Law, and Narratology.

Will Slocombe is Reader in English and Co-Director of the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures at the University of Liverpool, UK. His research interests embrace various areas of 20th- and 21st-century literature, with a primary focus on science fiction representations of Artificial Intelligence, representations of technology and technological development, postmodernism, and metafictions and experimental literature.

Genevieve Liveley is Professor of Classics and Turing Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Narratology (2019) and various chapters, articles, and books on AI, robots, and cyborgs – both ancient and modern. As a narratologist, she has particular research interests in stories and their impact on futures thinking – especially in the context of emerging technologies, AI, and cyber security.