1st Edition
Revisiting Imaginary Worlds A Subcreation Studies Anthology
The concept of world and the practice of world creation have been with us since antiquity, but they are now achieving unequalled prominence. In this timely anthology of subcreation studies, an international roster of contributors come together to examine the rise and structure of worlds, the practice of world-building, and the audience's reception of imaginary worlds. Including essays written by world-builders A.K. Dewdney and Alex McDowell and offering critical analyses of popular worlds such as those of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Minecraft, Revisiting Imaginary Worlds provides readers with a broad and interdisciplinary overview of the issues and concepts involved in imaginary worlds across media platforms.
Foreword
Rick Carter
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Mark J. P. Wolf
WORLDS ON THE RISE
Why Worlds Now?
Marie-Laure Ryan
Fictional World-Building as Ritual, Drama, and Medium
Lily Alexander
The Past as an Imaginary World: The Case of Medievalism
Dimitra Fimi
STRUCTURE
The Subcreation of J. R. R .Tolkien’s Middle-earth and How it Became Transmedial Culture
Lars Konzack
Secondary World Infrastructures and Tabletop Fantasy Games
Neal Baker
Battlestar Galactica and Caprica: Using Religion to Create Imagined Worlds
Erica Hurwitz Andrus
Religious Impulse in Video Games: Implications for World-Building
Edward Castronova
Minecraft: Transitional Objects and Transformational Experiences in an Imaginary World
Lori Landay
PRACTICE
A New Wonderland: The Source of It All
Michael O. Riley
"All Over the Map": Building (and Rebuilding) Oz
Henry Jenkins
Discovering the Planiverse
A. K. Dewdney
A Thousand Stories in a Day: Building Rilao and Reimagining Lagos
Laura Cechanowicz, Brian Cantrell, Geoffrey Long, Alex McDowell, Jeff Watson, and Ann Pendleton-Jullian
RECEPTION
‘The First Step into A Smaller World’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars
William Proctor and Matthew Freeman
The Hyper-enchantment of Visitin
Biography
Mark J. P. Wolf is a Full Professor and Department Chair of the Communication Department at Concordia University, Wisconsin. His books include Abstracting Reality, The Medium of the Video Game, Virtual Morality, The Video Game Explosion, Myst and Riven: The World of the D'ni, Before the Crash, Encyclopedia of Video Games, Building Imaginary Worlds, The LEGO Studies Reader, and Video Games Around the World. With Bernard Perron, he is the co-editor of The Video Game Theory Reader 1 and 2, and the Landmark Video Game book series.
"A ‘mixed bag’ in the best possible sense, Revisiting Imaginary Worlds offers a highly diverse collection of intriguing perspectives on the theory, history, practice, and reception of world-building across media that complements the editor’s earlier monograph Building Imaginary Worlds exceptionally well." -Jan-Noël Thon, author of Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture
"To understand why fictional realms become so deeply entangled with our culture and how materials, characters, and symbolic implications converge within them, the concept of subcreation again proves its value, also offering a distinct groundwork within the emergent scholarly field of world building." -Marta Boni, University of Montréal, editor of World Building. Transmedia, Fans, Industries
