On the Trail of Victorian Writers in Video Games

Two-way intermedia transfers regularly take place between literary texts and video games. If, on the one hand, some contemporary novels enrich and complicate the plot of pre-existing video games, on the other hand, some video games appropriate textual and paratextual elements of specific literary works of the past, such as events, characters and authorial figures. My paper discusses a series of examples falling into this second typology, as it will investigate the presence/absence of a group of diverse Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling within video games which variously adapt and appropriate some of their masterpieces. In particular, I will focus on the different ways in which the names, words and bodies of these canonical authors of English-language literary works appear or disappear in the various video games which I intend to examine and on the functions performed by the remediation or by the removal of these authorial figures as a result of a process of intersemiotic translation. In so doing, my analysis of the rewriting of the figures of some literary authors of the past in the video game medium offers a potentially useful contribution to the study of the contemporary multimedia reception of some specific Victorian writers, as well as of some of their best-known literary works