ABSTRACT
In a provocative 1992 essay for the New York Times, novelist Robert Coover
predicted the death of books of fiction and their transfiguration in a nonlinear
hypertext form:
Much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory
author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period,
from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. . . . But
true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible
now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer.
