The Fan Fiction Studies Reader ed. by Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse (review)

Fan studies, despite the field’s longevity and interdisciplinarity, largely lacks the historical scholarship that many disciplines boast. There are, of course, exceptions—notably, Francesca Coppa’s “A Brief History of Media Fandom” from Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays (2006)—but the fact remains: there is a gap in the historical literature in both the history of media fandom and fan studies. In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse address that gap by combining foundational and more recent scholarship to highlight and historicize fan fiction. While the themes and histories mapped throughout the collection could easily apply to fan studies more generally, the focus on fan fiction allows for a more targeted approach that easily borrows from established traditions in literary and cultural studies. From the field’s inception, fan fiction has served as an exemplar of new trends and an entry point for new scholars. As such, this collection is particularly well suited to orienting new scholars to the various waves of fan studies.

Though historically focused, the book is organized thematically with four sections, each preceded by a short introduction that contextualizes the selections and provides further reading suggestions. The first section, “Fan Fiction as Literature,” considers fan stories as literary artifacts that are read collectively, analytically, and literarily. It begins, as fan studies readers often do, with a selection from Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992). Roberta Pearson’s entry, “Sherlock Holmes in Cyberspace,” considers Holmesian literary fandom in the late 1990s. Building upon Jenkins’s introduction of pre-Internet fan communities and practices, Pearson assesses the changes wrought by fandom’s early shift online. She compares fans’ on- and offline analytical and interpretive approaches to source texts, concluding that Sherlock fans’ “experience of history may be qualitatively transformed by their participation in computer mediated communication” (45). Cornel Sandvoss’s “The Death of the Reader?” explores the ways in which literary theory can contribute to fan studies, evaluating theoretical models that balance the strengths of both disciplines: “In a state of constant audienceship . . . we need to formulate aesthetic categories that avoid the absolutism of traditional textual interpretation as much as the relativism of poststructuralism and deconstructionism” (73). Even in a section devoted to fan fiction as literature, Hellekson and Busse are careful to frame fan fiction as a cultural artifact, not a singular text, to preserve the “economy of collectively shared production, distribution, and reception” (24).

The next section, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” considers how fan fiction has often been studied as a response or corrective to hegemonic media texts, exploring the reinscription of feminist and/or queer narratives. Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith’s “Romantic Myth” addresses the age-old question: Why slash? By studying Kirk/Spock stories, they conclude that slash is an attempt by (female) fans to construct romantic equality. If both characters are male, neither is beholden to a cultural script that casts one of them as the inferior partner: “One problem common to contemporary women never arises: one partner’s interior sexual rank in a sexist society” (114). Joanna Russ’s “Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love” challenges those conclusions, arguing that slash is the sexualization of the female condition under patriarchal impositions. Her approach is refreshing: she foregrounds the sexually explicit aspects of fan fiction that are often overlooked. In perhaps one of the most versatile essays in the collection, Sara Gwenllian Jones considers the sex lives of cult television characters. Jones argues that slash is the actualization of latent textual elements in cult television shows. Addressing the paradigmatic, syntagmatic, and formulaic structures of cult television, Jones also explores how cult reception practices precipitate a shift from what to how that encourages fan engagement. This section reflects the boom of slash scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s in both subject and scope: the selections trace feminist themes in fan fiction...