Fanfiction and the Author pre-publication draft (original) (raw)

Fanning Flames/Flaming Fans: Theorising Fanfiction

Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture

Fanfiction is an enormously popular genre with a niche audience. And this niche is growing bigger and wider as more and more people join fan communities. These communities establish their virtual presence through fan labor, and fanfiction is a major contributor to the influence that a fandom constructs for itself.Juxtaposing this phenomenon with the rise of the digitization of literary spaces opens up the discourse about the evolution of literary spaces and genres. Fanfiction is the new item on the agenda that is garnering attention. Although quite a vast field of study, this paper is concerned with a uniform taxonomy and theory of Fanfiction.

Fan (Fiction) Acting on Media and the Politics of Appropriation

Media and Communication, 2017

Fanfiction is the creative appropriation and transformation of existing popular media texts by fans who take stories, worlds and/or characters as starting points and create their own stories based on them. As a cultural field of practice, fanfiction questions prevalent concepts of individual authorship and proprietary of cultural goods. At the same time, fanfiction itself is challenged. Through processes of mediatization, fanfiction grew and became increasingly visible. Third parties, ranging from the media industry (e.g., film studios) and copyright holders to journalism and academia, are interested in fanfiction and are following its development. We regard fanfiction communities and fan acting as fields for experimentation and as discursive arenas which can help understand what appropriating, writing and publishing in a digital culture and the future of writing might look like. In this paper, we outline important debates on the legitimacy and nature of fanfiction and present preli...

The 'Fanfic Lens': Fan Writing's Impact on Media Consumption

Participations. Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 2023

Scholarship frames fanfiction authors as inhabiting a complex double role as 'prosumers', both consuming commercial entertainment products and critically reinterpreting them in their own creative output. What has been overlooked are the ways in which fanfiction changes consumer behaviour beyond the moment and the spaces of fan engagement. I argue that even when approaching a completely new piece of entertainment media, fanfiction authors exhibit specific patterns of consumption shaped by their experience of agency, and habitual resistance against source texts, in fan writing. I propose that by adopting an authorial role, fan writers develop a lasting fandom-sensitive attitude I term the 'Fanfic Lens', which can be understood as a specific set of literacy skills gained from socialisation into fan communities. Using empirical participant data generated through an online survey and semi-structured interviews with young adult fanfiction authors, I identify four ways in which fanfiction may shape its authors' experience of media consumption. Building on these, I investigate how the 'prosumer' role of fanfiction authors is actualised in practice, calling for increased attention to its complexity and variability.

Literature Online: The Subversive Practices of Fan Fiction

Seminar BG, 2013

The article explores the effects of convergence culture (H. Jenkins) on the system of literary production and consumption. The study is focused on fanfiction culture with a special accent on Harry Potter fandom. The analysis investigates several areas where the creative practices of amateur writers challenge and subvert the corporate and state control over literary production: copyright vs. nonprofit literature, transformative work vs. plagiarism, literature vs. visual arts, author vs. audience, writer vs. reader, classical vs. popular literature, canon vs. fanon.

Authorizing Authorship: Fan Writers and Resistance to Public Reading

Historians of book and textual history have largely ignored fan writing as an area of literary critique and history. This intellectual lacuna exists primarily because of the dual problems of genre and gender; much of what we will consider as fan writing and fan fiction in this essay originates from science fiction and fantasy media properties from the 1960s onwards, and much of it is written by women, especially young women. Early studies of fan writing centred on ethnographic approaches that were deeply ahistorical and more concerned with the fans themselves as objects of study rather than with fan writing as a point of interest on its own. Concurrently, recent revisionist histories of women’s writing have looked at the various methods by which women have either participated in or circumvented traditional modes of publication, whether through manuscript publication, literary translations, or setting up their own private presses. What we hope to show here is how the body of fan writing has evolved over time, how those writers have disseminated their works, and what this means within the broader context of literary history and authorship theory.

Fandom and Fan Fiction

The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects, 2017

This entry presents an overview of the development and current state of fan studies, exploring the "reverse image" of media effects. The field of fan studies offers the ultimate rebuttal of the traditional media effects-model, by stressing the independence, agency and power of media consumers vis-à-vis media producers. After providing a short historiography of the discipline, this entry dives deeper into three themes that have been central to discussions within fan studies since its early beginnings: fan fiction, fan communities, and places of fandom.