Victorian Transfictions and Transmedia Storytelling

The introduction to this special issue of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, “Victorian Transfictions and Transmedia Storytelling,” reviews the state of the field of transmedia studies, and differentiates between commonly conflated terms, such as transmedia and adaptation. It argues that Victorian popular fiction lends itself particularly well to investigation through the concepts of transmediality and transfictionality. The production of popular fictions across the period was dominated by practices of recycling and seriality, and the flow of stories and characters across all kinds of creative and commercial outputs was unstoppable. The introduction identifies the contributions that this issue’s articles make to the fields of transmedia and popular fiction studies and invites further scholarship that, like ours, seeks to understand the rich field of nineteenth-century popular culture through transmedial lenses.