Experimentation is central to the Irish literary tradition, so it is striking to see that many new forms of digital literature remain uncultivated on this island. Where Irish literature has engaged with the digital, it is usually in the form of film-poetry, fragments of text set to video and sound. Other national canons have long progressed to more technically sophisticated genres – literary games, walking simulators, interactive fiction set in immersive virtual worlds – but Irish digital literature remains dominated by the film-poem, and in many respects, seems stagnated. But the situation in Ireland is not entirely bleak: in the figure of Doireann Ní Ghríofa, now a household name after the success of A Ghost in the Throat (2020), Ireland has a high-profile author who has shown a willingness to embrace the digital, something which may encourage further support for multimodal writing among arts practitioners and policymakers. Through its emphasis on Ní Ghríofa’s e-lit works, this chapter explores the past, present, and future of digital literature in Ireland, its major impediments, and possible futures.

In “Digital Nature,” Lai-Tze Fan adapts Lawrence Buell’s criteria for ecofiction in order to demarcate the emergent genre of “digital ecofiction,” which includes hypertext novels, video games, and other forms of multimedia art. Fan contends that the self-reflexive nature of digital texts like J. R. Carpenter’s The Cape and Eugenio Tisselli’s The Gate fosters in readers/users a critical awareness of their implication in environmental degradation through the use of digital technologies. Fan also suggests that digital ecofiction is well suited to address the challenges of the Anthropocene since it evokes alternative temporalities such as deep time and cyclical time.