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.

This volume collects twenty-two major essays by Werner Wolf published between 1992 and 2014, which have contributed to establishing 'intermediality' as an internationally recognized research field, providing a widely accepted typology of the field and opening intermedial perspectives on areas as varied as narratology, metareferentiality and iconicity.

This handbook provides an extensive overview of traditional and emerging research areas within the field of intermediality studies, understood broadly as the study of interrelations among all forms of communicative media types, including transmedial phenomena. Section I offers accounts of the development of the field of intermediality - its histories, theories and methods. Section II and III then explore intermedial facets of communication from ancient times until the 21st century, with discussion on a wide range of cultural and geographical settings, media types, and topics, by contributors from a diverse set of disciplines. It concludes in Section IV with an emphasis on urgent societal issues that an intermedial perspective might help understand.

Cinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the silent film. Defined in visual terms, the city symphony organizes the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint. In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.

How does a Romantic composer approach the poetry he sets: as raw material to be remade, a pretext for self-expression, a sanctified artefact, or a message to be illustrated with music? In my book, I examine Franz Liszt’s songs for voice and piano, which remain little known to scholars, artists, and music lovers alike. The objective is to present Liszt’s songs in all their complexity and diversity as well as identifying the key elements of the composer’s broadly understood song-writing technique – both those that make him unique and those that relate him to the European tradition. This approach also makes it possible to shed light on a major though previously neglected aspect of the composer’s workshop, namely, his work with the poetic text, which to Liszt was just as important as the musical setting.

The Emerging Contours of the Medium explores a crucial aspect of media thinking, focusing particularly on the 'mediality' of literature, a medium that remains today on the margins of the theoretical discussion of media. The book was written by a collective of authors based in the Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic. Even though interest in the technological and media aspects of literature has been slowly building momentum in the past several decades, from comparative perspectives to written culture to new media, the concept of the medium has not informed this process, and its systematic integration into literary studies has never been effectively carried out. Nor has the specific mediality of literature been successfully integrated into the general concept of media/lity in media science. Contributors to this work provide both an explanation of and solution to this mutual blindness, setting out from the question: What are the conditions for elaborating a media-theoretical framework in which to situate literature as a medium? The Emerging Contours of the Medium, available for the first time in English, is divided into three parts, which correlate to the three main research areas of the principles for a media theory of literature. Part 1 develops a perspective of the (pre)history of media thinking, grounding the principles of the genealogical integration. Part 2 concentrates on and develops the related perspectives of media philosophy and media anthropology. Part 3's main focus is the way media – as dispositifs interlinking the parameters of perception and communication – provide the ground for making emergent media phenomena visible, whether it be between media (in their mutual synergy or discrepancies), between media artefacts, or between human and apparatus. Stanislava Fedrová is Head of the Department of Art Historiography and Theory at the Institute of Art History at the Czech Academy of Sciences, researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Assistant Professor of Literature and Intercultural Communication at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her scholarly interests include literary theory, art theory, visual culture and intermedial research, with a focus on the relations between verbal and visual media. She is co-author, with Alice Jedlicková, of Visible Descriptions: Visuality, Suggestivity and Intermediality of Literary Description (2016). Tomáš Chudý works as an independent researcher, translator (Kittler, Luhmann, Taylor etc.) and lawyer for the Czech National Bank. His research interests include media philosophy and the interrelation of technical and humanist paradigms by means of working with signs, as well as interlinking social and economic aspects in technically mediated communication. He has published in scholarly journals, such as Social Studies, and he is the co-author, with Richard Müller et al., of the Czech edition of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (2020). Alice Jedlickova is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Associate Professor of Literature and Intercultural Communication at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research interests include intermedial studies (socio-spatial relations of cultural representations) and its history, literary theory, diachronic poetics and the theory of narrative. She is the editor of, and principle contributor to Narrative Modes of 19th Century Czech Prose (2022), and co-author, with Stanislava Fedrová, of the interdisciplinary inquiry Visible Descriptions: Visuality, Suggestivity and Intermediality of Literary Description (2016). She has published on transmediation as a marker of cultural continuity and on the potential of intermedial approach in education recently. Richard Müller is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences, professor of Comparative Literature at New York Univeristy Prague, and professor of Literary Criticism and Writing at the Prague School of Creative Communication. His research interests include the contextual transformations of literary mediality, the history of semiotics, (post)structuralism and cultural materialism, the genealogies of literary and media theory, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He is the editor of the scholarly journal Czech Literature, co-author, with Tomáš Chudý et al., of the Czech edition of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (2020), and co-author, with Pavel Šidák et al., of The Dictionary of Modern Literary Theory (2011). Martin Ritter is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research interests lie in phenomenology (especially concerning Jan Patocka), critical theory and German medial philosophy. As editor and translator, he has prepared a three-volume edition of Walter Benjamin's work, and is author of Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of Language (2009). His most recent book is Into the World: The Movement of Patocka's Phenomenology (2019, in English). Josef Šebek is Assistant Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research concerns cultural materialism, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and current French sociology of literature and works also on contemporary theory of discourse and rhetoric, media theory of literature, genres of life writing and queer studies. He is the editor of the scholarly journal Word &Sense, and author of Literature and the Social: Bourdieu, Williams, and Their Successors (2019). Pavel Šidák is researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal, Czech Literature, and professor of Literary Criticism and Writing at Prague School of Creative Communication, Czech Republic. His research interests include literary theory, literary genology and the relation between literature and folklore. He is the co-author, with Richard Müller et al., of The Dictionary of Modern Literary Theory (2011) and author of Introduction into the Study of Genres (2018). Josef Vojvodík is Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research focuses on modern literature and visual arts (specifically, symbolicist and post-symbolicist modernism and the avant-garde movements of the 1920s–1930s with 'transhistoric' links to Mannerism and Baroque), as well as German and French media, social and cultural anthropology, and phenomenology. He is the author of Surface, Latency, Ambivalence: Mannerism, Baroque and the (Czech) Avant-Garde (2008) and Pathos in Czech Art, Poetry and Artistic-Aesthetic Thinking of 1940's (2014).

Artists especially from dance and performance art as well as opera are involved to an increasing degree in the transfer between different media, not only in their productions but also the events, materials, and documents that surround them. At the same time, the focus on that which remains has become central to any discussion of performance. Performing Arts in Transition explores what takes place in the moments of transition from one medium to another, and from the live performance to that which "survives" it. Case studies from a broad range of interdisciplinary scholars address phenomena such as: The dynamics of transfer between the performing and visual arts. The philosophy and terminologies of transitioning between media. Narratives and counternarratives in historical re-creations. The status of chronology and the document in art scholarship. This is an essential contribution to a vibrant, multidisciplinary and international field of research emerging at the intersections of performance, visual arts, and media studies.

Incompletion is an essential condition of cultural history, and particularly the idea of the fragment became a central element of Romantic art which continued being of high relevance to the various strands of modernist and contemporary aesthetics.

From their inception, 'low culture' comics have intersected with the 'high culture' of Shakespeare. This is the first book-length collection dedicated entirely to the exploration of this collision. Its chapters illuminate the ways in which different texts, time periods, politics, authors, media, approaches and forms interact. Ranging from Classic Comics to Marvel, from tebeo to manga, from independent to mainstream comics, texts explored include Y: The Last Man, Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (The Sandman #19), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I Am Alfonso Jones, Marvel 1602, Doom 2099, and manga adaptations of The Tempest and Macbeth, among many others. As comic books and their big-screen progeny dominate mainstream popular culture, the association of Shakespeare with comics offers creators and critics tools with which to interrogate the place of Shakespeare within the English and global literary and cultural traditions. Shakespeare and Comics argues that, at a moment when the reassessment and reimagining of literary canons has become more urgent than ever, thinking about Shakespeare through the lens of comics invites us to imagine a literary and cultural landscape in which so-called 'great works' exist alongside and in equal conversation with marginalized writers, topics and forms.

The Intermediality of Contemporary Visual Arts explores a range of topics within the field. The volume delves into the realm of intermediality within the visual arts. Each chapter explores a different aspect; from the evolution of Intermedial Studies over the past decades to the shifts in print typography and the emergence of “cut-ups” within a context of resistance against conventions, the concept of Visual Music and its relation to pioneering filmmaking, visual representations of intimacy as they evolve from painting to other visual formats like comics, film, and television, and finally the transmedial potential of cultural symbols in virtual reality, all of which involve greater multimodal and emotional elements that enhance audience immersion. The volume closes by highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to visual art education and pedagogical methods that foster creativity, emphasizing the intermedial aspects present in contemporary visual arts.