Routledge Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling―typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape―this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the storyworlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing, and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of transmedia storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergence, popular culture, and historical media industries. Review "This book is an important contribution to the study of transmedia storytelling. With the aim to historicise transmedia storytelling, it offers an original point of view on the topic. In these pages transmedia practices become key to re-reading in an innovative way the history of twentieth century popular culture." --Paolo Bertetti, University Of Siena, Italy About the Author Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, UK and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Industrial Approaches to Media (2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology (2014).