I've assigned this Escapist article to help introduce my students to the genre. It offers a good overview. Recent interactive fiction publications of scholarly interest include:
* Nick Montfort's book, Twisty Little Passages, and his dissertation, "Generating Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction [http://nickm.com/if/Generating_Narrative_Variation_in_Interactive_Fiction.pdf]"
* Jimmy Maher's "Let's Tell a Story Together [http://home.grandecom.net/~maher/if-book/]"
* Jeremy Douglass's "Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media [http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2007/11/27/command-lines-dissertation-on-interactive-fiction-and-new-media/]"
* Jeffrey Lamar Howard's "Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy [http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~howard/dissertationGTA.pdf]"
* Eric Eve's "All Hope Abandon: Biblical Text and Interactive Fiction [http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000010.html]"
* My own "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky [http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html]"
Dennis G. Jerz [http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog]