Fictional World Research Articles

What are the architectural influences in the Harry Potter film series’ set design and immersive environments?

This research paper delves into the architectural influences on the set design within the Harry Potter film series and why it was so successful. This review focuses on three key locations—Hogwarts Castle, Diagon Alley, and the Burrow—studying the use of Gothic Revival, medieval, Victorian, and rustic architectural styles to uncover the film’s cultural and historical context. The study emphasizes the importance of thoughtful set design in audience engagement and creating a deeper connection with the fictional world. This case study demonstrates how architecture serves as a framework in set design and ultimately contributes to the massive success and impact of the Harry Potter series.

Scoring, Sounding, and Silencing Death: Musical Depictions of Failure in Coherent and Incoherent Worlds—Part 2

Abstract The sounds and music that accompany moments of death in video games frame our understanding of the fictional worlds represented. Using (in part) ideas from game studies, music theory, and music cognition, this article examines how the notion of coherent and incoherent worlds (Juul) interacts with musical and sonic representations of death in video games.

Impact of Technological Anxiety and Alien Invasion in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds.

The term science fiction is applied to those narratives in which unlike in pure fantasy an explicit attempt is made to render plausible the fictional world by reference to known, or imagined scientific principles, or to a projected advance in technology, or to a drastic change in the organization of society A Glossary of Literary Terms, Pg. 355. The science fiction has always a very important thematic topic about Alien invasion and their repercussions. Alien has always plundered or made humans slave while invading Earth in most of the books and movies. The book The War of the World’s speculates on this particular theme of Alien invasion on Earth by H. G. Wells. In the book The War of the Worlds a meteor lands on Earth in Horsell Common near to narrator’s house which later turns out to be an artificial cylinder launched towards Earth having Aliens in them. They invade earth to plunder the resources and to reign on Earth. The research paper will work on the title The Impact of Technological Anxiety and Alien Invasion in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds while looking for sub themes like, Technological Anxiety in the 19th Century, alien technologies, Comparative Analysis of Technological and Extraterrestrial Threats, and human adaptation. At the end the research paper we will see how Wells’s narrative ultimately reflects the broader anxieties of his time, revealing how technological progress and the unknown can together reshape our life.

Holy transmedia! - the many faces of Batman in 1960s Finland

ABSTRACT Superheroes exist in multiple narratives and storyworlds at the same time. Some of the stories and iterations are part of the character’s canon, while different adaptations and alternative versions inhabit other timelines and fictional worlds. Using the concept of transmedia universe, this article explores how fan-made and corporate-made adaptations of the character of Batman occupied the same universe and expanded the world inhabited by the character. Approaching the historical phenomenon of the 1960s Batmania from the point of view of adaptation studies, the article sheds light on local adaptations in a transmedia context.

Communication Simulation: On the Development of the Interpersonal Model

The article is devoted to developing an interpersonal model of communicative simulations constituted by a series of communicative practices within which various forms of social interaction are reproduced. The theoretical basis of the work was the study of the concepts of “Model/Simulacrum” and “Mimesis” in philosophy and narratology. The methodological approach proposed within the study was aimed at parameterizing interpersonal interaction in a communicative simulation through establishing the structure of interaction, its participants and the roles they actualize. Based on the model proposed, a typology of communicative simulations was suggested. Three types of communicative simulations were identified: narrative simulation, simulation for entertainment purposes, and falsification. The first type of communicative simulations (the narrative one) is the indirect interaction between the sender of a message (concrete or abstract author, narrator) and its recipient (concrete or abstract reader). The communicative practices of simulations of the first type include ASMR videos and fake news. The second type (simulation for entertainment purposes) involves the interaction of communicants within a fictional world. The participants in the interaction are a particular sender/recipient of a message, an abstract sender/recipient of a message, and avatars (characters). The communicative practices of simulations of the second type include sexting and role-playing games. The third type (falsification of social practice) is the interaction in which one of the participants is unaware of being involved in a communicative simulation. The participants in the interaction are a specific author of the simulation, a specific recipient of the message, an abstract author/recipient of the message, and an avatar, which is a social mask of the author of the simulation. The communicative practices of simulations of the third type include telephone fraud.

Elif Shafak and Amine Maalouf: Rerouting the Silk Road or Remapping the World Cartography

The present article juxtaposes the fictional world of two major contemporary literary figures, namely Elif Shafak and Amin Maalouf through two bestselling opuses, The Forty Rules of Love and Leo the African respectively. It investigates how the two texts’rereading of Arab Muslim history operates a discursive manipulation, which not only remaps the world cartography but more importantly designs textualities as ‘contact zones’, thus rehabilitating the ascendency of Oriental space and celebrating its multicultural essence, its civilizational stakes, and its unique spirituality.

A comparative study on the transcultural (re-)reception of The Untamed and its queerness with Chinese characteristics

Abstract Drawing on Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities, this article explores the various transcultural interpretations of queer opacity, a Chinese variant of queerness within dan’gai web series. This study reveals that while viewers employ a shared interpretive strategy of queer reading to identify queer opacity, the effect of queer interpretation is contingent upon the queer interpretive subcommunities’ familiarity with Chinese culture. Moreover, different cultures possess sub-strategies of queer reading: visibility reading is often practiced in the global northwest to initiate visibility politics in society, while opacity reading is used in the global southeast in an unconfrontational manner within fictional worlds. By examining a layered interpretive phenomenon that involves transcultural reaction videos towards the Chinese dan’gai web series The Untamed (TU), alongside the danmu from Chinese viewers on these videos, this study contributes to scholarship on transcultural queerness through the lenses of queer opacity and transcultural reader reception.

Approaching FromSoftware's Souls Games as Myth

FromSoftware’s Souls series comprises five separate fictional worlds, and yet is considered a series with a ‘spiritual’ connection. Although the games share the same developer, special attention has been paid, both in popular discourse and in research, to the distinctive character of FromSoftware’s worldbuilding and storytelling. I argue that a mythological approach allows us to better outline, analyse and put into relation the elements of these games. Mythology is understood as a model for understanding the world, following the work of Frog (2021) and Roland Barthes ([1972] 2009). This builds on mytholudics (Ford 2022), which adapts this understanding for the study of games. Through this, I examine three aspects of a potential Souls mythology: desire and purpose, godhood and divinity, and fire and dark. Additionally, I consider how the Souls community negotiates the Souls gameworlds, relating it to the role of folkloric storytellers in communities.

Dancing with BBoy: Transliteracies and critical imagination in superhero storytelling

AbstractIn this article, we describe a year‐long superhero storytelling project we facilitated with youth in a midwestern middle school. In this project, students read Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spiderman , designed superhero stories set in their community, and presented artistic representations of their stories to their families and peers. We present three episodes of mobile storytelling from this project, focusing on Aidan, one of eighteen youth participants. Using tools from theories of transliteracies and critical imagination, we illustrate how Aidan's embodied movement and play constituted critically literate acts. A transliteracies lens oriented toward critical imagination reveals how Aidan fluidly moved between fictional and real worlds to reimagine his experienced realities. These findings indicate a need to expand what counts as literate activity in schools.

Technoscientific speculations: the anti-mimeticism of Japanese science fiction in the literary context of the late Meiji period

This article proposes that Japanese science fiction emerged as an escape from the limits of the realistic representation of the world proposed by Naturalism. It reads three science fiction short stories published in the magazines Tanken sekai (World of Exploration) and Bōken sekai (World of Adventure) between 1907 and 1910 to discuss early science fiction in which authors utilised technoscientific discourse. Engaging in a set of textual practices centred on developments of modern science and technology, these authors developed one of science fiction’s distinctive features: anti-mimeticism, a literary mode focused on the depiction of anything that cannot happen in real life. This article focuses on the modalities by which these stories—Tenkūkaikatsu Dōjin’s ‘Gessekai shinkon ryokō’ (Lunar Honeymoon), Ishii Kendō’s ‘Gessekai dokuryoku tanken’ (Self-made Exploration to the Moon), and Hakui Michihito’s ‘Yukai to benri wo kiwametaru ōgon jidai no tokai seikatsu’ (The Extremely Amusing and Comfortable Golden Age of Urban Life) 1 —employ a rationalistic view of the phenomenal realm to generate fictional worlds that relinquish the dominance of a mimetic representation of reality. An analysis of early Japanese science fiction from the late Meiji period reveals two elements that eschewed the realistic literature such as Naturalism: objective narration and an anti-mimetic base for the fictional world.

Levkoi, Waschnik, härra Krokus ja teised. Baltisaksa laste mängu- ja kasvamismaailmad

This article focuses on imaginative childhood games and fictional playmates in Baltic German children’s games, as seen in the context of, and in relation to, Baltic German domestic and educational culture. Through reminiscing about these games, a view of the Baltic German domestic environment in all its diversity is opened up. It gives an insight into the mental environment – relationships within the immediate and extended family and domestic circle (which also included servants) and the relationships and interactions beyond, but also shares information about the physical environment – the everyday culture and way of life. And in the midst of it all, of course, the narrators are looking back on their own formative experiences and years. The examples of more or less imaginative games are drawn from the memoirs of nine Baltic German authors, of which one text is available in Estonian translation, while the others are unknown to the Estonian reader as complete texts, and therefore perhaps all the more interesting. The authors have been selected from the corpus of Baltic German memoir texts collected from reading, based on the focus of this article, i.e., texts that also deal with the author’s childhood and where fictional playmates and worlds are also discussed. The selection is certainly not exhaustive, but it provides a preliminary insight into the subject. Baltic German memoir literature, especially concerning the generations whose childhoods passed during a period of stability and peace – whether at the end of the 19th century before Russification, or the pre-World War I era – often exhibits a particular contrast. Childhood and youth were left behind at a time when the world was still in order, when the life as it used to be had not collapsed. Later Baltic Germans very often wrote memoirs with their descendants in mind, in order to create a generational link, to introduce the lost world and way of life, but also to generalise the impact of historical events from the individual level to the national group as a whole. Post-World War II memory work directed at descendants became particularly significant, as everything had once again and irreversibly gone. The examples of imaginative childhood games and fictional playmates in the Baltic German memoirs discussed in this article carry a positive tone, occasionally accompanied by a light-hearted and wise reflection. Children were encouraged to engage in independent play, while not being neglected, especially the younger children, for whom the presence of an ‘interested adult’ in the background was noticeable. Storytelling and literature played a key role in the development of imagination and creativity. The plots of literary works were transferred to games and further developed, and dramatization techniques were employed using readily available resources. In addition to classical and romantic literature, the physical environment – buildings, interiors, the surrounding nature – also exerted important influence. Fictional companions existed both in the case of an only child and in the case of children growing up among siblings. In the latter case, there were often shared fantasy characters and worlds – whether they were just air or on paper. Adults also became part of the imaginary worlds and retained their role as interested observers – as long as the imaginary world did not overflow too much – leaving room for individual originality, which has been considered a distinctive feature of Baltic German society. The authors recall their childhood with fond memories, where home and family formed a stable, secure and vital growing environment, and the necessary resilience and resourcefulness for coping with life’s challenges. As such, these examples also fit into the framework of what Helene Hoerschelmann calls “old-school Baltic German upbringing”. Undoubtedly, the self-aware adaptability acquired during their childhood and youth served them well – the successive pivotal historical events, wars and revolutions became an inevitable part of their lives. Thus, a study of the history of the Baltic Germans’ childhood and upbringing could be of interest not only as part of an unknown or forgotten and lost world, but also as a multifaceted source of reflection and comparison, especially from today’s perspective.

인공지능 문학의 가능성과 한계에 대한 연구

Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is accelerating with the development of ICT and AI, and people are enjoying benefits such as “biological human enhancement” through various advanced technologies. However, there are also concerns that the advancement of science and technology may shrink the realm of human creativity. This study explores the possibilities and limitations of AI's ability to create literary art. Since the first AI-authored literary attempt in 1984, AI's ability to create literature has improved by leaps and bounds with the introduction of deep learning. GPT-3, in particular, has learned far more text and 175 billion parameters than its predecessors, resulting in a remarkable linguistic ability. GPT-3 can produce text that is virtually indistinguishable from human writing, and some researchers describe it as creative, witty, deep, and beautiful. However, there are questions about GPT-3's capabilities. GPT-3 is limited to generating text based on existing works, does not form a coherent narrative, and requires guidance from a human user. It has also been criticized that GPT-3 plays a “probability game,” choosing words based on statistical probabilities, which is inherently different from human creation. Nevertheless, GPT-3's creations often contain compelling and eye-catching parts. In the creation of literary works, novelty is divided into novelty in the “story” and novelty in the “telling” of the story. A story requires a “fictional world” that includes characters and events, and to create a finished story is to create a fictional world. The narrative technique or style is telling, which refers to the author's distinctive style. It is still useful to examine whether AI can reach each stage. While AI may be able to imitate some forms, the question remains whether its output will have lasting and unique formal characteristics. The technology for creating AI poetry involves entering keywords based on a language model, extracting.

Of Shadowcats and Pipeweed: Fantastic Animal and Plant Names in a Cross-linguistic Comparison

The paper focuses on the names of fictitious species of animals and plants and on their position in the creation of fictional worlds. The examined sample of occasionalisms, or nonce words, is drawn from popular and influential writings, which include J. R. R. Tolkien’s works, Terry Pratchett’s texts, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series and George R. R. Martin’s The Song of Ice and Fire series. The position of the sign in the word-formation system of both the original language of the work and of selected translations is analyzed – mainly English, German, and Czech versions are taken into account. A cross-linguistic comparison leads to the conclusion that the choices made by the writer or the translator in naming fictional species correspond, on the one hand, to the linguistic habits of the language in question, while, on the other hand, providing room for linguistic experimentation and influence from the language of the original text. The paper also shows how the chosen texts, through the usage of fictitious names of species, attempt to meet the readers’ expectations for speculative literature. The presence of boundary crossing, hybridization, and linguistic creativity makes foregrounded world-building possible. However, accentuated connections between the words and between the species of the fictional and the actual world also show that an unambiguous, simpler world is presented this way. Word-formation is presented by the study as a way to link the actual world and the simplified speculative world, thus highlighting its importance.

The Show, the Game, and the Old Gods: On the Ontological Reframing and the Fiction/Real Boundary

The recent decade brought increasing interest in metareferentiality in video games. The article builds upon the body of research regarding metaleptic transgression in games by discussing examples of specific occurrences in which a text or a character seemingly escapes from within the boundaries of their primary, fictional world in a way that resembles ontological metalepsis. Acknowledging that such transgression is impossible, the article proposes that discussed examples might not be examples of metalepsis but rather ontological reframing, a cognitive shift in perception. The case studies come from games by Daniel Mullins and Sam Lake.

Maak een vuist als je geen hand hebt. Inclusiviteit in (pre)historische jeugdromans

The one-handed hero: Inclusiveness in historical fiction for childrenHaving grown up with a sister in a wheelchair meant that I took this normalcy into the fictional world of the past. So when I crossed paths with Drem in Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1958 novel Warrior Scarlet, he was to me just a boy with one functional arm. It was not until much later that I realised he was one of the very few protagonists in historical fiction with a disability. A lack of inclusiveness is problematic, first, when it comes to readers identifying with the physical condition of the hero(ine) and, second, because, from an archaeological perspective, the proportion of healthy people in historical fiction seems improbably high, while the representation of people with a disability is often stereotyped. Maybe archaeologists should provide authors of historical fiction with a more informed description of the past.

The representation of African American identity on screen for a Spanish audience

Existing studies of translations of audio-visual productions that explore African American issues focus exclusively on African American Vernacular English and culturally specific references, the standardisation or omission of which are seen to compromise the originals’ critique of race and their value for in-group identity. This article takes a multimodal approach to three such productions dubbed for a Spanish audience. Firstly, it examines how characters’ African American identity is rendered not only by language but also visually and aurally. Comprehension in dubbed versions is more likely to be affected by non-linguistic matters, such as casting of voice talent. Secondly, it is shown how translations shape the audio-visual creation of a fictional world and extra-diegetic elements that address a particular audience and thus enable in-group identification along ethnic lines. Lastly, an alternative translation strategy is outlined that targets audiences from the international Black diaspora to whom such productions might appeal.

South African Allegories in Richard Jefferies’s After London; or Wild England (1885)

This paper argues that Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885), often praised as a pioneering work of speculative fiction, has not been sufficiently understood within the context of late-Victorian imperial expansion. While After London is frequently read in tandem with Jefferies’s nature essays and speculative fiction like H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), I locate the novel within the generic conventions of lost world fiction, a subgenre of the imperial romance associated with masculine adventure tales. Analysing After London’s parallels with, and potential influences on, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), published later that same year, I argue that Jefferies’s unflattering portrayal of English ‘Bushmen’, coupled with the geography of Wild England, gesture emphatically to South Africa. In turn, the motif of a ‘relapse into barbarism’ serves to rationalise the fantasies of terra nullius [‘nobody’s land’] and extractive treasure hunting that Felix Aquila, the quixotic hero, enacts. By connecting After London to Haggard’s highly influential fiction and drawing on Jefferies’s writings about British colonialism in South Africa and the conventions of travel literature, cartography, and ethnography, this paper provides a more complete understanding of Jefferies’s contributions to the canon of lost world fiction.

플라톤의 아틀란티스에 나타난 전제조건과 임의성 연구

This paper studies the term ‘utopia’ that has prerequisite and arbitrariness to understand Atlantis in a unknown aspects. The origin of utopia comes from the place name ‘Atlantis’ mentioned by Plato. Plato demarcated us to contemplate the ideal world of Atlantis through human knowledge and experience. There are elements that allow us to recognize utopia related to its prerequsite and arbitrariness in this paper. Based on the absolute belief that there are no logical errors in utopia, we can freely traverse the world of utopia. The term ‘utopia’ represents a repeated place that does not exist in real world. This fictional world becomes a possible world similar to the real thing through our imagination. So that the Atlantis mentioned by Plato derives secondary theories. This problem starts from the fact that the prerequisites and arbitrariness of Atlantis are omitted at any rate. The story of Atlantis was created during the time when the Earth was considered the center of the universe. Plato created a space that could be interpreted with new knowledge in order to map Atlantis. Atlantis becomes a new model for the world as it reflects changes and technology. Therefore, it is a world dominated by theory and arbitrariness. In literature and philosophy, we create worlds similar to Atlantis to observe and experiment with new events. Plato gave birth to a new world, and Atlantis deeply engages with changes over time. Consequently, Atlantis is a place where the proactive meaning of utopia occurs. This paper starts from the fact that new information and technological advancements about Atlantis endlessly produce new narratives.

Влияние синтаксических средств репрезентации времени и пространства на образ персонажа в сказке М.Е. Салтыкова-Щедрина «Пропала совесть»

<p>The image of a character in a literary text is realized by a set of various means, and not only the description of physical qualities fills the characters up with characteristics. Spatial and temporal indicators determine how a character “exists” in a fictional world, and leave the imprint of the narrative created by the author (epoch and change of events) on him. Using the example of a character (conscience) from M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s fairy tale it is shown how syntactic constructions shape space, time and the appearance around the character.</p>

The Affective Turn in Metamodernist Fiction and “New Sincerity”

The aim of the article is to analyze pragmatic strategies and mechanisms to enhance narrative empathy, the key notion of metamodernist fiction that distinguishes it from postmodernist and modernist literary texts. The article postulates foregrounding of emotivity markers in metamodernist texts as a linguistic manifestation of the cultural logic of “new sincerity” in the contemporary fiction that is characterized by the lack of an explicit ludic modality of postmodernist fiction and by stressing means of producing emotional resonance on the part of the reader and their active perspective-taking. The article makes an original contribution to cognitive stylistics, multimodal studies and narratology by hypothesizing polyphony of narrative “voices”, second-person narrative and visual foregrounding as effective pragmalinguistic tools of triggering emotive and cognitive empathy that increases reader’s immersion in metamodernist fictional worlds. Using the novels by M. Porter and J. Egan, the short stories by J.S. Foer and D. Eggers as its case studies, the article proves the relevance of viewing the “new sincerity” concept as a driving force behind the authorial empathy towards fictional characters, which enhances emotionogenic potential of metamodernist fiction and contributes to reader’s engagement with modeled emotive situations. The findings of the research testify to the importance of further research into “new sincerity” and potential mechanisms of inducing reader’s empathy which is justly considered a powerful instrument for promoting social interaction, helping readers of all ages to inhibit aggression and develop understanding of others’ motives, emotions and desires.