Game of Thrones: The Politics of World-Building and the Cultural Logic of Gentrification

It has become commonplace to proclaim that we live in a new Golden Age of television drama. Since the late 1990s, we have experienced a deluge of serialized television that is routinely compared (often favorably) to masterpieces from the literary canon. HBO evangelists have proclaimed that the television series is already the dominant narrative form for the twenty-first century, as film was for the twentieth, and the novel had been for the nineteenth. Whether or not this kind of hyperbole is justified remains to be seen, but when the most frequently discussed question within a university’s English literature department is no longer ‘what book do you recommend?’ but ‘which series should I be watching?’, it seems obvious that our media hierarchy has undergone some kind of shift.