Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1

This open access book promotes the idea that all media types are multimodal and that comparing media types, through an intermedial lens, necessarily involves analysing these multimodal traits. The collection includes a series of interconnected articles that illustrate and clarify how the concepts developed in Elleström’s influential article The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) can be used for methodical investigation and interpretation of media traits and media interrelations. The authors work with a wide range of old and new media types that are traditionally investigated through limited, media-specific concepts. The publication is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary research, advancing the frontiers of conceptual as well as practical understanding of media interrelations. This is the first of two volumes. It contains Elleström’s revised article and six other contributions focusing especially on media integration: how media products and media types are combined and merged in various ways.

Lars Elleström is Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnæus University, Sweden. He presides over the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies and chairs the board of the International Society for Intermedial Studies. His recent publications have explored and developed basic semiotic, multimodal and intermedial concepts aiming at a theoretical model for understanding and analysing interrelations among dissimilar media.

“Solid, reliable, and still, exciting. What more would we wish from in-depth academic work? This collective, collaborative work is based on a deep understanding of what scholarly work should be: an act of communication between producers and perceivers, as the view presented here would have it; one that makes its readers feel involved. This is the only way they can learn something new.” (Mieke Bal, Video Artist, Curator, and Cultural Theorist at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Netherlands)

“What are the most illuminating ways to talk about the relations among different media? This endlessly stimulating collection asks this question of media as different as theatrical acting and staging, digital storytelling, audiobooks, architecture, and ecocriticism. The results confirm Lars Elleström’s status as the leading theorist of intermedial studies, and the one most likely to provoke other colleagues to equally provocative explorations.” (Thomas Leitch, Professor of English, University of Delaware, USA)