Navigating cyberliterature borders: Comparative Twitterature narratology in Neil Gaiman’s Hearts, Keys and Puppetry and Alberto Chimal’s Ciudad X: Novela en 101 Tuits

Nourigholamizadeh, Elaheh; Yazdanpanahi, Marjan

doi:10.22059/jcss.2026.408666.1219

Navigating cyberliterature borders: Comparative Twitterature narratology in Neil Gaiman’s Hearts, Keys and Puppetry and Alberto Chimal’s Ciudad X: Novela en 101 Tuits

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original article

Authors

Department of American Studies, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/jcss.2026.408666.1219

Abstract

Background: Cyberliterature, also known as digital or electronic literature, encompasses literary creations designed for digital platforms, leveraging interactivity, hyperlinks, multimedia, and non-linearity.
Aims: Twitterature—a portmanteau of "Twitter" and "literature"—adapts traditional genres like poetry, aphorisms, and fiction to Twitter's constraints (initially 140 characters, later 280) and affordances, such as real-time threading and hashtags.
Methodology: This study conducts a pioneering comparative analysis of Neil Gaiman's Hearts, Keys and Puppetry (2009)—a crowd-sourced #bbcawdio/@BBCAA fairy-tale twovel—and Alberto Chimal's Ciudad X: Novela en 101 Tuits (2014)—a sequential dystopian countdown posted October 10 on @albertochimal/@CityX101—employing Henry Jenkins's transmedia storytelling and participatory culture theories alongside Gérard Genette's five transtextual layers: intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality, and hypertextuality.
Findings: The analysis dissects how both exploit Twitter's technical limits for serialized engagement: Gaiman's 874 participatory tweets foster English fairy-tale postmodernism (Alice/Oz allusions, invitational paratexts, reflexive chaos, portal hybrids, audiobook parody), while Chimal's solitary 101 posts embed Latin American Magical Realism (Ayotzinapa glitches, ritual countdowns, institutional critique, speculative poetry, print pastiche). Convergences emerge in Jenkinsian expansions amid ephemerality, yet divergences highlight cultural mediation: Gaiman's British redemptive whimsy expands global flows via crowd curation tempering multiplicity; Chimal's Mexican narco-protest contracts mythopoetic urgency through precise menace.
Conclusion: Addressing authorship interplay, platform linguistics, coherence impacts, and cyberliterature border navigation through participatory flows, this cross-cultural narratology fills a scholarly gap in Twitterature studies, affirming its palimpsestic potency in linking global idioms and democratizing authorship for ordinary creators, while inviting multilingual extensions.

Keywords

Main Subjects

humanities & social sciences

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