Navigating Imaginary Worlds

by Mark J.P. Wolf (Editor)

This edited anthology offers a collection of essays that each look at various types of wayfinding. Together they explore a variety of wayfinding tools and techniques and their applications, as well as ways of keeping track of the construction of worlds too.

With transmedial worlds extending over multiple media, multiple authors, and sometimes even multiple decades of creation, a wealth of different issues can arise; worlds need to direct audience members into how to organize them conceptually. Edited by Mark J. P Wolf and featuring contributions from a distinguished set of authors from interdisciplinary backgrounds, this book enriches the theory, history, and practice of world-building, through the exploration of navigation. The essays have many overlapping concerns and together they provide the reader with a range of discussions regarding wayfinding and the many ways it intersects with world-building - and world-experiencing - activities. Thus, rather than just analyzing worlds themselves, the anthology also asks the reader to consider analyzing the act of world-building itself.

This collection will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields including Subcreation Studies, Transmedia Studies, Popular Culture, Comparative Media Studies, Video Game Studies, Film Studies, and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies.

316 pages, Hardcover

Published June 15, 2025

About the author

Mark J. P. Wolf is Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin.