Description
From The Brothers Karamazov to Star Trek to Twin Peaks, this collection explores a variety of different imaginary worlds both historic and contemporary.
Featuring contributions from an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars, each essay looks at a particular imaginary world in-depth, and world-building issues associated with that world. Together, the essays explore the relationship between the worlds and the media in which they appear as they examine imaginary worlds in literature, television, film, computer games, and theatre, with many existing across multiple media simultaneously. The book argues that the media incarnation of a world affects world structure and poses unique obstacles to the act of world-building. The worlds discussed include Nazar, Barsetshire, Skotopogonievsk, the Vorkosigan Universe, Grover’s Corners, Gormenghast, Collinsport, Daventry, Dune, the Death Gate Cycle universe, Twin Peaks, and the Star Trek galaxy.
A follow-up to Mark J. P. Wolf ’s field-defining book Building Imaginary Worlds, this collection will be of critical interest to students and scholars of popular culture, subcreation studies, transmedia studies, literature, and beyond.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Foreword
Scott Adams
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Mark J. P. Wolf
WORLDS OF WORDS
The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground by Ludvig Holberg: Subcreation and Social Criticism
Lars Konzack
‘A Little Bit of England Which I Have Myself Created’: Creating Barsetshire across Forms, Genres, Time, and Authors
Helen Conrad O’Briain
Mythopoetic Suspense, Eschatology and Misterium: World-Building Lessons from Dostoevsky
Lily Alexander
Building the Vorkosigan Universe
Edward James
AUDIOVISUAL WORLDS
Our World: World-Building in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town
Mark J. P. Wolf
"Suckled On Shadows": States of Decay in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Novels
Edward O’Hare
The Gothic World-Building of Dark Shadows
Andrew Higgins
Daventry and the Worlds of King’s Quest
Christopher Hanson
TRANSMEDIA WORLDS
The Softer Side of Dune: The Impact of Social Sciences on World-Building
Kara Kennedy
Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: Balance and Interconnectivity in the Fractured Worlds of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s The Death Gate Cycle
Jennifer Harwood-Smith
Welcome to the "Second-stage" Lynchverse – Twin Peaks: The Return and the Impossibility of Return Vs. Getting a Return
Matt Hills
The Fault in Our Star Trek: (Dis)Continuity Mapping, Textual Conservationism, and the Perils of Prequelization
William Proctor
Appendix: On Measuring and Comparing Imaginary Worlds
Mark J. P. Wolf
