This book is both a contribution to an interdisciplinary study of literature and other media and a pioneering application of cognitive and frame-theoretical approaches to these fields. In the temporal media a privileged place for the coding of cognitive frames are the beginnings while in spatial media physical borders take over many framing functions. This volume investigates forms and functions of such framing spaces from a transmedial perspective by juxtaposing and comparing the framing potential of individual media and works. After an introductory theoretical essay, which aims to clarify basic concepts, the volume presents eighteen contributions by scholars from various disciplines who deal with individual media. The first section is dedicated to framing in or through the visual arts and includes discussions of the illustrations of medieval manuscripts, the practice of framing pictures from the Middle Ages to Magritte and contemporary American art as well as framings in printmaking and architecture. The second part deals with literary texts and ranges from studies centred on framings in frame stories to essays focussing on the use of paratextual, textual and non-verbal media in the framings of classical, medieval and modern German and American narrative literature; moreover, it includes studies on defamiliarized framings, e.g. by Julio Cortázar and Jasper Fforde, as well as an essay on end-framing practices. Sections on framings in film (including the trailers of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings) and in music (operatic overtures and Schumann's piano pieces) provide perspectives on further media. The volume is of relevance to students and scholars from various fields: intermedia studies, cognitive approaches to the media, literary and film studies, history of art, and musicology.

Taking Mary Shelley's novel as its point of departure, this collection of essays considers how her creation has not only survived but thrived over 200 years of media history, in music, film, literature, visual art and other cultural forms. In studying monstrous figures torn from the deepest and darkest imaginings of the human psyche, the essays in this book deploy the latest analytical approaches, drawn from such fields as musicology, critical race studies, feminist studies, queer theory and psychoanalysis. The book interweaves the manifold sounds, sights and stories of monstrosity into a conversation that sheds light on important social issues, aesthetic trends and cultural concerns that are as alive today as they were when Shelley's landmark novel was published 200 years ago.

Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledges for Preserving Cultural Diversity theme is a component of Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and Humanities in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme on Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledge's for Preserving Cultural Diversity provides six different topics: 1. Language, literature and human sustainability; 2. Relationships among literature and other artistic activities and discourses ; 3. Comparative literature and other fields of knowledge; 4. Comparative literature, criticism and media ; 5. Comparative literature in the age of global change; 6. Translatio studii and cross-cultural movements or Weltverkehr. These three volumes are aimed at a wide spectrum of audiences: University and College Students, Educators and Research Personnel.

In Touching the Passion — Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith, Donna Sadler explores the manner in which worshipers responded to the carved and polychromed retables adorning the altars of their parish churches. Framed by the symbolic death of Christ re-enacted during the Mass, the historical account of the Passion on the retable situated Christ’s suffering and triumph over death in the present. The dramatic gestures, contemporary garb, and wealth of anecdotal detail on the altarpiece, invited the viewer’s absorption in the narrative. As in the Imitatio Christi, the worshiper imaginatively projected himself into the story like a child before a dollhouse. The five senses, the sculptural medium, the small scale, and the rhetoric of memory foster this immersion.

Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics explores how graphic narratives reframe global crises while also interrogating practices of fact-finding. An analog print phenomenon in an era shaped by digitalization, documentary comics formulates a distinct counterapproach to conventional journalism. In what ways are ‘facts’ being presented and framed? What is documentary honesty in a world of fake news and post-truth politics? How can the stories of marginalized peoples and neglected crises be told? The author investigates documentary comics in its unique relationship to framing: graphic narratives are essentially shaped by a reciprocal relationship between the manifest frames on the page and the attention to the cognitive frames that they generate. To account for both the textuality of comics and its strategic use as rhetoric, the author combines theories of framing analysis and cognitive narratology with comics studies and its attention toward the medium’s visual frames.

The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media--everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games--is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society. "Storyworlds across Media" explores how media, old and new, give birth to various types of storyworlds and provide different ways of experiencing them, inviting readers to join an ongoing theoretical conversation focused on the question: how can narratology achieve media-consciousness? The first part of the volume critically assesses the cross- and transmedial validity of narratological concepts such as storyworld, narrator, representation of subjectivity, and fictionality. The second part deals with issues of multimodality and intermediality across media. The third part explores the relation between media convergence and transmedial storyworlds, examining emergent forms of storytelling based on multiple media platforms. Taken together, these essays build the foundation for a media-conscious narratology that acknowledges both similarities and differences in the ways media narrate.

This volume collects twenty-two major essays by Werner Wolf published between 1992 and 2014, all of them revised but retaining the original argument. They form the core of those seminal writings which have contributed to establishing 'intermediality' as an internationally recognized research field, besides providing a by now widely accepted typology of the field and opening intermedial perspectives on areas as varied as narratology, metareferentiality and iconicity. The essays are presented chronologically under the headings of “Theory and Typology”, “Literature–Music Relations”, “Transmedial Narratology”, and “Miscellaneous Transmedial Phenomena” and cover a wide spectrum of topics of both historical and contemporary relevance, ranging from J.S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Gulda through Sterne, Hardy, Woolf and Beckett to Jan Steen, Hogarth, Magritte and comics. The volume should be essential reading for scholars of literature, music and art history with an interdisciplinary orientation as well as general readers interested in the fascinating interaction of the arts.

In this volume, specialists from different fields present case studies of text-image relationships in the religious field (1400-1700) with a methodological and/or theoretical dimension.

This book looks closely at the endings of narrative digital games, examining their ways of concluding the processes of both storytelling and play in order to gain insight into what endings are and how we identify them in different media. While narrative digital games share many representational strategies for signalling their upcoming end with more traditional narrative media – such as novels or movies – they also show many forms of endings that often radically differ from our conventional understanding of conclusion and closure. From vast game worlds that remain open for play after a story’s finale, to multiple endings that are often hailed as a means for players to create their own stories, to the potentially tragic endings of failure and "game over", digital games question the traditional singularity and finality of endings. Using a broad range of examples, this book delves deeply into these and other forms and their functions, both to reveal the closural specificities of the ludonarrative hybrid that digital games are, as well as to find the core elements that characterise endings in any medium. It examines how endings make themselves known to players and raises the question of how well-established closural conventions blend with play and a player’s effort to achieve a goal. As an interdisciplinary study that draws on game studies as much as on transmedial narratology, Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games is suited for scholars and students of digital games as well as for narratologists yet to become familiar with this medium.

Culture is dependent upon intertextuality to fuel the consumption and production of new media. The notion of intertextuality has gone through many iterations, but what remains constant is its stalwart application to bring to light what audiences value through the marriages of disparate ideology and references. Videogames, in particular, have a longstanding tradition of weaving texts together in multimedia formats that interact directly with players. Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games brings together game scholars to analyze the impact of video games through the lenses of transmediality, intermediality, hypertextuality, architextuality, and paratextuality. Unique in its endeavor, this publication discusses the vast web of interconnected texts that feed into digital games and their players. This book is essential reading for game theorists, designers, sociologists, and researchers in the fields of communication sciences, literature, and media studies.