The Expanded 'Verse: Serialized Transmediality in Firefly/Serenity

Popular narratives often extend textual content across multiple media platforms, creating transmedia stories. Recent scholarship has stressed the permeability of "the text," suggesting that the framework of a text, made up of paratexts including trailers and DVD extras, must be included in textual analysis. Here, I propose that this notion may be productively coupled with a theory of seriality––we may frame this phenomenon in the filmic terms of a narrative being comprised of transmedia sequels and/or prequels, or in the televisual language of episodes in a series. Through a textual analysis of the multifaceted transmedia narrative Firefly (2002-2003), I argue for a theoretical framework that further destabilizes the traditional text by considering such paratextual works as comic books, web videos, and the feature film Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005) as narrative continuations within a single metatext that eschews the centrality of any one text over the others in favour of seriality.