Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Tabel of Contents -- About the Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Notes -- Worlds on the Rise -- Chapter 1: Why Worlds Now? -- Cosmology -- Philosophy -- Media and Technology -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Chapter 2: Fictional World-Building as Ritual, Drama, and Medium -- Heteroglossia: It's a Bird? It's a Plane? -- Untying the Knots of Fiction and Reality -- Why Always? The Roots of Imaginary Worlds -- Fictional Worlds and Ritual Structure: Advancing Self and Society -- Being There: Total Immersion, Astonishment, and Enchantment -- Guess What? From Myth to Video Game -- Interlinking Storyworlds and Perpetual Mythic Networks -- Fictional World-Building as Drama: Stories Bring Worlds to Life -- Breach and Imbalance: The Dramatic Premise of the Fictional World -- Kingdoms of Violence and Spheres of Hope -- Fictional World-Building as Medium -- The God's-Eye View: Consciousness of the Higher Order -- The Big Bang of the City-Civilization -- Strange Urban Types: The City as a Riddle -- The Novel as a New Medium -- Parallel Lines Crossing: Confusing Math of City Demographics -- Modernist as Demiurge: The Creator of Worlds -- The Media Is the Message and the Mind -- Toward Conclusions -- The Play Is the Thing to Catch the Conscience of the King -- Notes -- Chapter 3: The Past as an Imaginary World: The Case of Medievalism -- An Unlikely Trio -- 'Dreaming of the Middle Ages' -- 'Naturally, a Manuscript' -- Three Little Middle Ages -- Notes -- Structure -- Chapter 4: The Subcreation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and How It Became Transmedial Culture -- Tolkien's Stance on Rationality in Fairy-Stories -- Modernist Criticism -- Tolkien's Multimodal Work -- Tolkien Fandom -- Tolkien Adaptations by the Media Industry -- Notes