Introduction
The introduction to Prehistoric Digital Poetry offers an overview of digital poetry in order to situate Funkhouser’s study. Claiming that “nothing particularly new [in digital poetry] has emerged since the initiation of the WWW," Funkhouser establishes that digital poetry uses modernist techniques to create a postmodern text, concerned with intertextuality and the relationship of language to the world (3). He then introduces the period of digital poetry’s history under consideration and outlines the structure of his inquiry, noting that each chapter will present examples of a particular form and engage aesthetic and material issues involved with creating and consuming the poems. For many readers, the connection between print-based poetry and digital poetry is of great importance. To attend to this concern, Funkhouser conducts an extensive literature review featuring writings of the French symbolists, modernist poets such as Pound and Eliot, contemporary poets and critics, and hypertext theorists which will be useful to other researchers.