ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a narratological approach to the analysis of transmedial franchises’ specific brand of narrative complexity that goes beyond the model of the “single world.” Instead, it employs the theoretical frame of transmedial narratology to distinguish between work-specific storyworlds, transmedial storyworlds as noncontradictory compounds of work-specific storyworlds, and transmedial universes as occasionally quite contradictory compounds of transmedial storyworlds. In order to describe the sometimes rather complex storyworld interrelation within transmedial universes in more detail, such an approach can further ask to what extent two narrative works within a transmedial franchise are defined by a relation of redundancy, by a relation of expansion, or by a relation of modification.
