Winter is coming. Every Sunday night, millions of fans gather around their televisions to take in the spectacle that is a new episode of Game of Thrones. Much is made of who will be gruesomely murdered each week on the hit show, though sometimes the question really is who won't die a fiery death. The show, based on the Song of Fire and Ice series written by George R. R. Martin, is a truly global phenomenon.

With the seventh season of the HBO series in production, Game of Thrones has been nominated for multiple awards, its cast has been catapulted to celebrity and references to it proliferate throughout popular culture. Often positioned as the grittier antithesis to J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Martin's narrative focuses on the darker side of chivalry and heroism, stripping away these higher ideals to reveal the greed, amorality and lust for power underpinning them.

Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones is an exciting new addition to the Intellect series, bringing together academics and fans of Martin's universe to consider not just the content of the books and HBO series, but fan responses to both. From trivia nights dedicated to minutiae to forums speculating on plot twists to academics trying to make sense of the bizarre climate of Westeros, everyone is talking about Game of Thrones. Edited by Kavita Mudan Finn, the book focuses on the communities created by the books and television series and how these communities envision themselves as consumers, critics and even creators of fanworks in a wide variety of media, including fiction, art, fancasting and cosplay.

About the Author
Kavita Mudan Finn is an independent scholar who previously taught medieval and early modern literature at Georgetown University, George Washington University, Simmons College, Southern New Hampshire University, and the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 2010 and published her first book, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography 1440-1627, in 2012. Her work has also appeared in Shakespeare, Viator, Critical Survey, and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, and she has edited several collections, most recently Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones (2017, Intellect). She is currently working on her second book, which looks at representations of and fan responses to premodern women in television drama.

Reviews

'Through its focus on the cultural phenomenon that is Game of Thrones, Finn's collection is a timely exploration of the ways in which audiences not just consume but interact with cultural texts in the social media age.'

-- Aimee Burns, Media Education Journal



Book Information
ISBN 9781783207848
Author Kavita Mudan Finn
Format Paperback
Page Count 267
Imprint Intellect Books
Publisher Intellect Books
Weight(grams) 340g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 178mm * 11mm