Multiverse Fiction: A narratological approach to infinite worlds narratives

In recent years, movies and tv shows have increasingly adopted the notion and the structure of the multiverse from superhero comics, resulting in a great popularity of the concept across a wider audience. The article aims to define the basic features of contemporary multiverse narratives, and to explore some of their textual applications. The first part will deal with the narratological theory of parallel worlds in fiction, following Marie-Laure Ryan’s and Karin Kukkonen’s analyses, to outline five key features shared by each multiverse narrative. The second part will be devoted to three significant case studies, that show three different applications of the multiverse as a textual device: Everything Everywhere All at Once as an example of intertextual narrative; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, that relies on a cultural dominant; and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a transmedial storyworld expanded through the characteristics of the multiverse.