Intermediality in this Handbook is understood broadly as the study of interrelations and interactions among all forms of media. With a certain emphasis on artistic media, this Handbook primarily offers extensive overviews written by experts in the fields of traditional and emerging research areas within the realm of intermediality that will guide scholars, newcomers to the field, and general audiences in discovering the many facets of intermedial theories and practices, without excluding more innovative perspectives such as the new-materialist approaches to the notion of medium.

The Handbook is conceived at a moment of increasing interdisciplinarity and media convergence: it is ever more vital to think and understand debates across old disciplinary boundaries. Intermediality studies already do this on some level and by their nature is a prime area in which to model cross-disciplinary and comparative work. Therefore, the Handbook is not just about demonstrating the range, variety and conceptual differences within the field, but about placing different perspectives and approaches in dialogue with one another, thus demonstrating the permeability and perhaps even inadequacy of disciplinary, historical and other boundaries that have traditionally been used to organize knowledge production.

With Europe historically being the center of intermediality-focused scholarship, the Handbook also looks outward toward scholarship about or rooted in other geographical and cultural contexts. It is an invitation to a decidedly global field of intermedial studies that acknowledges worldwide flows and counterflows of media and knowledge production, considering intermediality across multiple spatiotemporal dimensions involving intra-actions and inter-actions of all components. The Handbook works centripetally, seeking to organize ideas and concepts, and at the same time centrifugally, broadening the discussion of various geographically and culturally defined theories and practices.