Thanks to modern technology, we are now living in an age of multiplatform fictional worlds, as television, film, the Internet, graphic novels, toys and more facilitate the creation of diverse yet compact imaginary universes, which are often recognisable as brands and exhibit well-defined identities. This volume, situated at the cutting edge of media theory, explores this phenomenon from both theoretical and practical perspectives, uncovering how the construction of these worlds influences our own determination of values and meaning in contemporary society.

ToC:
Introduction  9
Worlds, Today
  / Marta Boni
SECTION 1: THEORIES OF WORLD BUILDING
1. The Aesthetics of Proliferation  31
  / Marie-Laure Ryan
2. Building Science-Fiction Worlds  47
  / Paolo Bertetti
3. “He Doesn’t Look Like Sherlock Holmes”: The Truth Value and Existential Status of Fictional Worlds and their Characters  62
  / Julien Lapointe
4. “Visible World”: The Atlas as a Visual Form of Knowledge and Narrative Paradigm in Contemporary Art  77
  / Cristina Baldacci
SECTION 2: ECONOMIES OF WORLD BUILDING
5. A World of Disney: Building a Transmedia Storyworld for Mickey and his Friends  93
  / Matthew Freeman
6. World-Building Logics and Copyright: The Dark Knight and the Great Detective  109
  / Roberta Pearson
7. Battleworlds: The Management of Multiplicity in the Media Industries  129
  / Derek Johnson
8. Platform Producer Meets Game Master: On the Conditions for the Media Mix  143
  / Marc Steinberg
9. Narrative Ecosystems: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Media Worlds  164
  / Veronica Innocenti and Guglielmo Pescatore
SECTION 3: IMMERSION
10. The Building and Blurring of Worlds: Sound, Space, and Complex Narrative Cinema  187
  / Justin Horton
11. Beyond Immersion: Absorption, Saturation, and Overf low in the Building of Imaginary Worlds  204
  / Mark J.P. Wolf
12. Zombie Escape and Survival Plans: Mapping the Transmedial World of the Dead  215
  / Bernard Perron
13. MMORPG as Locally Realized Worlds of Action  231
  / Laurent Di Filippo
SECTION 4: MEDIA AS WORLD-BUILDING DEVICES
14. The Worries of the World(s): Cartoons and Cinema  253
  / Karen Redrobe (formerly Beckman)
15. Linguistic Terrain and World Time: Chinese Media Theories and Their World Imaginations  272
  / Victor Fan
16. The Worlds Align: Media Convergence and Complementary Storyworlds in Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World  287
  / Dru Jeffries
17. World Building and Metaf iction in Contemporary Comic Books: Metalepsis and Figurative Process of Graphic Fiction  304
  / Denis Mellier
SECTION 5: APPROPRIATIONS AND FAN PRACTICES
18. The Monster at the End of This Book: Metalepsis, Fandom, and World Making in Contemporary TV Series 321
  / Valentina Re
19. Traversing the “Whoniverse”: Doctor Who’s Hyperdiegesis and Transmedia Discontinuity/Diachrony  343
  / Matt Hills
20. Transmediaphilia, World Building, and the Pleasures of the Personal Digital Archive  362
  / Jim Collins
21. The Politics of World Building: Heteroglossia in Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist WondaLand  377
  / Dan Hassler-Forest
Index  393.

[ToC + Intoduction (pdf):]
http://en.aup.nl/download/9789048525317%20ToC%20+%20Intro.pdf

Marta Boni is assistant professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Montreal.

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World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries.
Ed. by Marta Boni.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017, 396 p., ill., 25 cm.
(Transmedia.).
ISBN 9789089647566 (hb., $124,00/EUR 99,00)
ISBN 9789048525317 (eb., $123,99/EUR 98,99)