George Landow (professor)

George P. Landow is Professor of English and Art History Emeritus at Brown University. He is 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.

George Landow has published extensively on John Ruskin the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, specifically the life and works of William Holman Hunt.

Landow is 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 has been a consistent proponent of visual overviews and navigational maps, he has long argued that hypertext navigation is not a problem—that hypertexts are not more difficult to understand than linear texts.

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