Book description
Mark J.P. Wolf’s study of imaginary worlds theorizes world-building within and across media, including literature, comics, film, radio, television, board games, video games, the Internet, and more. Building Imaginary Worlds departs from prior approaches to imaginary worlds that focused mainly on narrative, medium, or genre, and instead considers imaginary worlds as dynamic entities in and of themselves. Wolf argues that imaginary worlds—which are often transnarrative, transmedial, and transauthorial in nature—are compelling objects of inquiry for Media Studies. Chapters touch on:
- a theoretical analysis of how world-building extends beyond storytelling, the engagement of the audience, and the way worlds are conceptualized and experienced
- a history of imaginary worlds that follows their development over three millennia from the fictional islands of Homer’s Odyssey to the present
- internarrative theory examining how narratives set in the same world can interact and relate to one another
- an examination of transmedial growth and adaptation, and what happens when worlds make the jump between media
- an analysis of the transauthorial nature of imaginary worlds, the resulting concentric circles of authorship, and related topics of canonicity, participatory worlds, and subcreation’s relationship with divine Creation
Building Imaginary Worlds also provides the scholar of imaginary worlds with a glossary of terms and a detailed timeline that spans three millennia and more than 1,400 imaginary worlds, listing their names, creators, and the works in which they first appeared.
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
-
1 Worlds within the World
- The Philosophy of Possible Worlds
- Imagination, Creation, and Subcreation
- Degrees of Subcreation
- Story vs. World: Storytelling and World-building
- Invention, Completeness, and Consistency
- Immersion, Absorption, and Saturation
- World Gestalten: Ellipsis, Logic, and Extrapolation
- Catalysts of Speculation
- Connecting the Secondary World to the Primary World
-
2 A History of Imaginary Worlds
- Transnarrative Characters and Literary Cycles
- The Mythical and Unknown World
- Travelers’ Tales and the Age of Exploration
- Utopias and Dystopias
- The Genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy
- The Rise of Mass Media
- The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s Influence
- New Universes and the Rise of the Media Franchise
- Interactive Worlds
- Into the Computer Age
- Worlds as Art and Thought Experiments
- 3 World Structures and Systems of Relationships
- 4 More than a Story: Narrative Threads and Narrative Fabric
- 5 Subcreation within Subcreated Worlds
- 6 Transmedial Growth and Adaptation
- 7 Circles of Authorship
- Appendix: Timeline of Imaginary Worlds
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
Product information
- Title: Building Imaginary Worlds
- Author(s):
- Release date: March 2014
- Publisher(s): Routledge
- ISBN: 9781136220807
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