- Demonstrates how changes unique to each platform connect with the rise of transmedia storytelling
- Attributes the rise of the post-apocalyptic genre to concurrent transformations in the media industry rather than cultural fears
- Advances a new understanding of genre-medium coevolution
Buy this book
- About this book
-
This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is really just the beginning…
- About the authors
-
Stephen Joyce is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of A River of Han: Eastern Tragedy in a Western Land.
- Reviews
-
“Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse convincingly and brilliantly brings together its objects of study. Stephen Joyce pushes us to think about transmedia storytelling, its industrial/narrative cores and its ‘franchise guardians’, in new and important ways. Combining analyses of failure and success in franchises like The Terminator and The Walking Dead with provocative discussions of fandom, this is a fantastic addition to transmedia studies.” (Matt Hills, University of Huddersfield, UK)
- Table of contents (11 chapters)
-
-
Doomsday Dreaming
Pages 3-14
-
The End of the Media as We Know It
Pages 15-35
-
The Appeal of the Apocalypse
Pages 37-54
-
The Endings of I Am Legend
Pages 57-76
-
Battlestar Galactica’s Post-9/11 Apocalypse
Pages 77-98
-
Table of contents (11 chapters)
Recommended for you

Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
-
- Book Title
- Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse
- Authors
-
- Stephen Joyce
- Copyright
- 2018
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
- eBook ISBN
- 978-3-319-93952-0
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-319-93952-0
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-3-319-93951-3
- Softcover ISBN
- 978-3-030-06753-3
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- X, 220
- Topics