The study of transmediality requires a shift in perspective: it entails an intensified focus on networks and their perennial dynamisms. Transmedia historians and media archaeologists aim to map out ‘textual networks’ by looking for ‘textual “fossils”’ in order to reconstruct the ‘production and consumption practices’ (Scolari et al., 2014, p. 6) that they were involved in at the time. In this context, ‘industrial contingencies’, historically bound ‘technological affordances’, along with ‘the constitution of audiences and the conditions of reception, or the thematic and narrative conventions of the period’ become central (Freeman qtd. in Jenkins, 2018, n. pg.). In other words, nineteenth-century transmedia studies encompasses bottom-up endeavours to identify, map out, and inspect a series of relationships between human and non-human actants (cf. Latour, 2005; Bennett, 2010) and link them to larger socio-cultural, political, and legal contexts. An emphasis on transmedia practices makes visible not only the contingencies and instabilities of extant networks, it also brings to light a variety of dependencies in a larger socio-economic context of capitalist market society. Considering that ‘[p]ractices are forms and ways of agency, performance and action that are discursive, material and systemic’ (Meyer and Pietrzak-Franger, 2022, p. 14, original italics), the above emphasis allows us to inspect (and rethink) power and hierarchies in the making, drawing attention to the diversity of agential possibilities and limitations that they carried with themselves.

Hence, to study transmediality is to study transformations. These transformations appear on a number of micro- and macro-levels: a study of particular figures that, liberated from a given textual realm, began a trans-textual and transmedial existence (e.g., Sherlock Holmes, Alice), to the extent that a bank has to employ a secretary to answer letters written to a fictional detective; an investigation into how particular texts, like Dickens’s Christmas Carol, mutated in the wake of trans-generic and cross-media adaptations; a consideration of cross-national networks that require an (organized or arbitrary) co-operation between, for example, theatre agents, publishers, syndicates, illustrators, readers, printers, and courts. In effect, all those levels of inquiry encourage a study of the ‘lives of texts’ in their synchronic and diachronic transformations. The ‘text’ here is a cultural practice that involves a variety of actants and requires a close-knit contextualization. Regarding a text as a dynamic entity that finds instantiations in a variety of media and genres also requires a heightened attention to the various affordances that particular media platforms have: as a fairy tale, Bleak House changes in length and detail; as a board game, the history and the ideology of the suffrage movement must be condensed and turned into a sequence of meaningful and ideologically dense events; as a series of verbal descriptions and visual signs, disease symptoms must be both compiled from various cases and ultimately reduced to essential, recognizable signs.

Overall, the emphasis on the dynamisms of networks and transformations leads to a more complex perception of nineteenth-century (textual) production, attentive not only to the transformative content of many of the texts produced at the time but also to the mediality/materiality of their instantiations. With this in mind, what can be studied are the strategies or practices that fostered a text’s longevity (often despite initial reservations), or caused its imminent death (in spite of its popularity). Another effect is the emphasis on a variety of actants. When a text is shown to exist in a network of intertextual borrowings and/or inter- and transmedia loops and depends on a number of people, institutions, and technologies, the romantic notion of the solitary creator necessitates a new theorization. Instead, what gains in importance are collaborative endeavours, dependencies, and frictions as well as a novel spotlighting of the author-spectator relationship. Such emphasis also draws attention to the ways in which fictionality and factuality, as two poles of the same spectrum, are closely intertwined. Finally, it also requires a lens that goes beyond national divides.

In the nineteenth century, transmedia practices were often accelerated, rather than stopped, by national borders. British medical authors were indebted to their colleagues around the world for correspondence (including drawings and photographs) that would help them identify and classify particular disorders. Many medical publications (like atlases) relied on the international circulation of printable material. Similar developments were characteristic of popular culture. Punch, itself an homage to the French Charivari, for instance, was emulated worldwide in a fashion similar to today’s magazine packages adapted for particular (national) markets. The popularity of Dickens’s multimedia worlds spurred not only one-off dramatizations or adaptations but also veritable long-standing international co-operations. They also greatly influenced the shape of international copyright arrangements. In Saxony, Christian Tauchnitz, who published English-language literature for distribution on the continent in the form of inexpensive paperbound precursors of paperbacks, offered the only authorized (and then copyrighted) editions of the U.K. and American novels. Although highly prominent at the time, all these inter- and cross-national developments have only recently sparked scholars’ interest. The emphasis on literature and the centrality of the Anglo-American context have led to a decades-long disregard of other sources, archives, and spaces of transmedia gestation, which, when recovered, have the potential to transform the ways we think about literature in particular and the Victorian era in general.

Expanding the study of transmedia practices to global (and hence also other particular local) contexts would potentially enable further transformations. It would help 1) build new roadmaps and pathways into the not yet visible entanglements of the era. A new emphasis on bottom-up, local practices and their diachronic and synchronic expansion, would also pave the way for 2) novel spotlighting, if not cross-lighting of chosen phenomena. In this way, the 3) dynamisms of various dependencies, power struggles, and agential possibilities would be brought to light. Drawing the maps of nineteenth-century transmediality, would offer 4) a novel glance not only at literature (industry) but also at globalization and transculturation. This considered, one could pay more attention to 5) the co-existence and multi-directionality of various practices.

Transmediality then, could offer a possible, practical way of going beyond the national paradigm. Tanya Agathocleous (2015) has argued that while recent discussions almost consensually consider the importance of such an expanded study, the concrete manner of doing so is unclear. In the long run, such an approach may be helpful in rethinking the theoretical debate of differentiating between global, transnational, and other processes. Ideally, we would, jointly, be able to draw maps of crossroads, pulsating centres, multi-directional movements, and supra-national structures and transformations: something, one can only do in co-operation – and it is here that I see the future of global nineteenth-century studies that may be fostered by, but not limited to, a transmedia approach.

Indeed, the examples I have so far used testify to a series of blind spots: my own and those of recent nineteenth-century and transmedia scholarship. Even though I have had the privilege to pursue cultural, literary, performance, and media studies, my emphasis has been (biographically and academically) centred on the U.K. and U.S.A. cultures (with lengthy excursions into Polish, German, Austrian, and French, mainly since these are the languages that I speak and the cultures that have shaped me). Even though, in comparison, this makes my work rather diverse and me well qualified to pursue transmedia practices across national borders, the problems with in-depth studies already begin with the lack of (further linguistic and actual) access to local archives and materials. Considering all this, I see global nineteenth-century transmedia studies as a potential step to reshape academia.

Allow me to reframe my discussion in terms of a utopian vision for future (global) nineteenth-century scholarship. Historiographies have not yet entirely shaken off their occidentalist, centralist, Anglophone, and literary biases; transmedia scholarship can offer new directions for all four of these contexts. 1) Transmediality requires collaboration. A nineteenth-century transmedia studies would entail fresh and unexpected, multi-disciplinary alliances. These could bring together fashion, media, and medicine historians, geographers, illustrators, biologists, chemists, along with material studies and literary scholars, for instance, in a joint exploration of how historical local therapies were popularized across the world. It is to hope that, through this reshuffling, there would be less space for ossified structures and toxic environments and more for ‘natural’ growth and collegiality. A transmedia model allows to highlight the transcultural travel of texts and objects and to inspect their changing value. As it does so, it calls for an examination of a variety of those objects’ archival traces. In the long run, then, it encourages a multi-modal and multi-generic study that goes beyond traditional disciplines and requires new instruments and new supra-disciplinary methodologies. 2) Transmedia works on a local and global level: local spotlighting and (diachronic and synchronic) global expansion would mean the necessity to take into consideration the simultaneous multiple sites of particular transmedia practices. In effect, this would allow for the birth and intensification of cross-continental, multi-lingual collaborations. This would, ideally, entail 3) a novel distribution of resources and finances, with funds going to the preservation and curation of a variety of local archives. Such (strategic) collaborations, as they grow, would have a chance not only to 4) tap into extant grant schemes but also to help us push for further financial aids and with this, by and by, transform the third-party funding landscape itself.

All of this, of course, would only be possible in an ideal world. In a world in which any ‘crisis’ serves as an excuse to derail the humanities, global nineteenth-century transmedia studies may allow for strategic networks to develop which, in the long run, can improve our chances of survival (at least for a couple of decades). Yet, of course, every utopia also houses a dystopia, and so, inevitably, there looms the spectre of exploitation, further centralization, oversimplification, and an unfair distribution of resources. Transmediality may not offer a panacea for all the evils that plague academia today; it allows, though, for a thought experiment that helps us to hope.