George Landow (professor)


George Paul Landow was Professor of English and Art History Emeritus at Brown University. He was a leading authority on Victorian literature, art, and culture, as well as a pioneer in criticism and theory of Electronic literature, hypertext and hypermedia. He also pioneered the use of hypertext and the web in higher education.
WWW victorianweb.org/cv/lando...

Work

George Landow published extensively on John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, specifically the life and works of William Holman Hunt.
Landow was also a leading theorist of hypertext, of the effects of digital technology on language, and of electronic media on literature. While his early work on hypertext sought to establish design rules for efficient hypertext communication, he is especially noted for his book Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology, first published in 1992, which is considered a "landmark" in the academic study of electronic writing systems, and states the view that the interpretive agenda of post-structuralist literary theory anticipated the essential characteristics of hypertext.
In Hypertext Landow draws on theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, among others, and argues, especially, that hypertext embodies the textual openness championed by post-structuralist theory and that hypertext enables people to develop knowledge in a non-linear, non-sequential, associative way that linear texts do not. Though he was a consistent proponent of visual overviews and navigational maps, he long argued that hypertext navigation is not a problem—that hypertexts are not more difficult to understand than linear texts.
Landow also pioneered the use of the web in higher education with projects such as The Victorian Web, The Contemporary, Postcolonial, & Postimperial Literature in English web, and The Cyberspace, Hypertext, & Critical Theory web. J. Yellowlees Douglas recognizes Landow's early hypertext works like the Dickens Web and Landow and John Lanestedt's The "In Memoriam" in The End of Books or Books without End?

Select works

  • Hypertext 3.0 : Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
  • Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
  • Hypertext : The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
  • Hyper/Text/Theory, 1994Hypermedia and Literary Studies, 1994 The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities, 1993 Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer, 1986A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship: The Correspondence of William Holman Hunt and John Lucas Tupper, 1986Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and Its Contexts, 1985Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present, 1982Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows; Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought, 1980Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, 1979William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism, 1979The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, 1972

Honors