Intertextuality, intermediality, metafiction, fictionalisation : Neil Gaiman’s fictional and non-fictional manifesto for stories and storytelling

A prolific British contemporary writer, Neil Gaiman (1960-) is constantly blurring boundaries. His work constantly recycles, redefines and expands characters, plots, and often whole stories, through a variety of literary genres (short stories, comics, non-fiction) and media (visual, digital), a process coined by Jenkins as “transmedia storytelling.” My research seeks to examine the implications of this protean creative process, or “narrative dissemination” (Camus), for both the reader’s interpretation of his work, and for Gaiman’s identity as a writer. In a seemingly open-ended creative process, Gaiman’s stories and characters proliferate over and above the traditional boundaries between genres and media. Throughout his discourses, however, one concept remains immutable: his consideration of the story as his primary concern, and of his identity as a storyteller rather than a writer. The overarching aim of my study is to identify the ways in which Gaiman’s works of fiction and non-fiction champion this precedence of the story. Calling to notions such as intertextuality, intermediality, metafiction, fictionalisation and posture, it seeks to interrogate the role played by the disseminative strategies characterizing Gaiman’s narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, in the establishment of his fictional and non-fictional manifesto for stories and storytelling.