Intermedial storytelling

The ubiquity of photography caused by the ‘digital revolution’ in the 1990s and by other cultural developments has had an immense impact on fiction written since. As this study exemplifies, intermedial novels relating to the visual medium have been flourishing in the last two decades, especially in English and American literature. Against the backdrop of these developments, the aim of the present book is threefold: By exploring the forms photography takes in literature and the impact it has on narration, this study establishes a taxonomy of different, highly innovative genres (of intermedial novels thematising, imitating or/and incorporating photography). Combining elements of cognitive narratology and intermediality studies, the present investigation explores ‘intermedial storytelling’. It develops a toolkit for the analysis of intermedial and hybrid novels, which may not only be applicable to literary texts relating to photography but also to others referring to and/or incorporating other media, such as music, film, or digital media. Nine model analyses demonstrate the value of the established toolkit for interpretation. They determine some of the most important effects which the different strategies of intermedial storytelling (mixing photographic and verbal ways of expression) create within specific literary works, their story worlds, and regarding the extra-textual medial and cultural circumstances they possibly refer to.