Description
Transmedia Character Studies provides a range of methodological tools and foundational vocabulary for the analysis of characters across and between various forms of multimodal, interactive, and even non-narrative or non-fictional media.
This highly innovative work offers new perspectives on how to interrelate production discourses, media texts, and reception discourses, and how to select a suitable research corpus for the discussion of characters whose serial appearances stretch across years, decades, or even centuries. Each chapter starts from a different notion of how fictional characters can be considered, tracing character theories and models to approach character representations from perspectives developed in various disciplines and fields.
This book will enable graduate students and scholars of transmedia studies, film, television, comics studies, video game studies, popular culture studies, fandom studies, narratology, and creative industries to conduct comprehensive, media-conscious analyses of characters across a variety of media.
Table of Contents
0. Transmedia Character Studies – An Introduction
SECTION 1 Foundations of Characters across Media
1. Characters as Subjective Consciousness Frames
2. Characters as Actants in Narrative Events
3. Characters as Social Representation
SECTION 2 Characters in Different Narrative Media
4. Embodied Characters in Film, TV Shows, and Cosplay
5. Cartoonish Characters in Comic Books and Animated Films
6. Interactive Characters in Video Games
SECTION 3 Foundations of Transmedia Character Analysis
7. Transmedia Characters as Networks of Character Versions
8. Serial, Pre-narrative, and Meta-narrative Characters and Figures
SECTION 4 Characters and Non-Fiction
9. Fictional Characters and Figures (Imagined to Exist) in Actual Contexts
10. Fictionalized and Non-Fictional Characters
Perspectives and Reflections: Transmedia Character Studies?
