The phenomenon of fantasy transmediality (Rebora 2016) has been discussed by many researchers and scholars during the last decade. The need for the creation of alluring cultural products in the highly competitive new media environment has led to synergies between many cultural industries and/or cultural producers, such as film, music, literature and videogame industries, etc. Many well-known and fan-developing narratives have been remediated – repackaged and redistributed – through the various media, answering to the contemporary nostalgia of pastness (Williams 2016), the cherishing of the familiar and intimate, as well as the need to further popularize "a pre-conceived merchandising industry" (Ball 2002), create new side-products for a fan community or even offer escapelands, which fantasy narratives succeed in creating. This paper will examine the translation and adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (LOTR) to different media and cultural industries, such as:- Peter Jackson's films, - role-playing games (RPGs), - the music industry – with reference to well-known songs and bands.Through comparative analysis of certain segments of the LOTR industry market and comments made by fans on digital platforms, the paper underlines the basic story elements of the Tolkien universe, as adapted to each above-mentioned variant and examines the role of fans in the digital semiosphere.
Intro -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense -- 1 Go Fiwa Molao/Giving the Law: Marriage, Law and Social Change in Botswana -- 2 'You can Learn to Do It Right, or You can Learn to Do It Wrong': Marriage Counselling, Togetherness and Creative Conservatism in Lynchburg, Virginia -- 3 Marriage, Time, Affect and the Politics of Compromise in Athens -- 4 Getting Married as a Trial: Deferring Marriage in Jinmen, Taiwan
Marriage globally is undergoing profound change, provoking widespread public comment and concern. Through the close ethnographic examination of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense places new and changing forms of marriage in comparative perspective as a transforming and also transformative social institution. In conditions of widespread socio-political inequality and instability, how are the personal, the familial and the political co-produced? How do marriages encapsulate the ways in which memories of past lives, present experience and imaginaries of the future are articulated? Exploring the ways that marriage draws together and distinguishes history and biography, ritual and law, economy and politics in intimate family life, this volume examines how familial and personal relations, and the ethical judgements they enfold, inform and configure social transformation. Contexts that have been partly shaped through civil wars, cold war and colonialism – as well as other forms of violent socio-political rupture – offer especially apt opportunities for tracing the interplay between marriage and politics. But rather than taking intimate family life and gendered practice as simply responsive to wider socio-political forces, this work explores how marriage may also create social change. Contributors consider the ways in which marital practice traverses the domains of politics, economics and religion, while marking a key site where the work of linking and distinguishing those domains is undertaken.