Fans and the billion-dollar franchises in which they participate have together become powerful agents within popular culture. These franchises have launched avenues for fans to expand and influence the stories that they tell. This book examines those fan-driven narratives as "wilderness texts," in which fans use their platforms to create for themselves while also communicating their visions to the franchises, thus spurring innovation.The essays in this collection look at how fans i...

Suspended between continents and cultures, Donald Quist charts the forceful undercurrents of an American identity. Through these essays Quist explores feelings of oppression and alienation as he wrestles with a single act of violence in a Washington, D.C. suburb, racial tensions in a rural South Carolina town, and the welcome anonymity of crowded Bangkok streets. These personal narratives are rich with Quist's experience growing up as a person of color caught between parents, socioeconomic...

Fans have been responding to literary works since the days of Homer's Odyssey and Euripedes' Medea. More recently, a number of science fiction, fantasy, media, and game works have found devoted fan followings. The advent of the Internet has brought these groups from relatively limited, face-to-face enterprises to easily accessible global communities, within which fan texts proliferate and are widely read and even more widely commented upon. New interactions between readers and writers of f...

**A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 HonoreeNBCC John Leonard First Book Prize FinalistAspen Words Literary Prize FinalistNamed a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, NPR, Elle, Esquire, Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, The Root, Harper’s Bazaar, Paste, Bustle, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, LitHub, New York Post, Los An...

A comprehensive and sustained analysis of the development of storytelling for televisionOver the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium th...

Anime: A Critical Introduction maps the genres that have thrived within Japanese animation culture, and shows how a wide range of commentators have made sense of anime through discussions of its generic landscape. From the battling robots that define the mecha genre through to Studio Ghibli's dominant genre-brand of plucky shojo (young girl) characters, this book charts the rise of anime as a globally significant category of animation. It further thinks through t...

2018 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist Helium is the debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers. Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, rac...

Brings together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumersHenry Jenkins's pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and socially connected consumers of popular culture and that they represent the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though marginal and largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, med...

Winner of the Independent Publisher Book AwardKirkus Best Nonfiction of the Year“Snyder shows us how to summon the courage to imagine in a cruel and dangerous world. A beautiful book.” -Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Rogues and Empire of Pain“A gorgeous memoir that parses the patriarchy with an endearing frankness as fierce as it is, astonishingl...

How digital visual effects in film can be used to support storytelling: a guide for scriptwriters and students.Computer-generated effects are often blamed for bad Hollywood movies. Yet when a critic complains that "technology swamps storytelling" (in a review of Van Helsing, calling it "an example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood computer-generated effects movies"), it says more about the weakness of the story than the strength of the technology. In D...

The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction is a comprehensive overview of the history and study of science fiction. It outlines major writers, movements, and texts in the genre, established critical approaches and areas for future study. Fifty-six entries by a team of renowned international contributors are divided into four parts which look, in turn, at:history – an integrated chronological narrative of the genre’s developmenttheory – detailed ac...

An award-winning writer delivers a poignant and provocative novel of identity, race and the search for belonging in the age of globalization.One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn’t recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school—and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny...