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Introduction: Why a Fan Fiction Studies Reader Now?
- University of Iowa Press
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Introduction Why a Fan Fiction Studies Reader Now? A fan fiction studies reader is overdue: fan fiction studies as a field is still in its early stages—as is fan studies. Both are increasingly gaining widespread appeal, however, and the field is quickly growing as an academic interdisciplinary subdiscipline. Fan studies offers a theoretical apparatus that explains much of the appeal of current audience responses and user-generated content. Anyone who has ever fantasized about an alternate ending to a favorite book or imagined the back story of a minor character in a favorite film has engaged in creating a form of fan fiction. Anyone who has ever recommended a YouTube mash-up, shared a cat macro, or reposted a GIF set has participated in the online culture of audience-generated texts. These more ephemeral artifacts are not available for purchase at Amazon.com but instead are often subjected to takedowns for either supposed terms of service or DMCA copyright violation—accusations that are difficult to fight and are therefore often successful even when not warranted. Yet these ephemeral artifacts are important traces of a culture where the producer has learned to use freely available tools to rip, record, and disseminate derivative creative artworks based on another media source. Studying them, and even creating them, can tell us much about our culture, and such study is worth our time. The earliest works in the academic literature in the field of fan studies date only from the mid-1980s, but since then, fan studies has emerged as a truly interdisciplinary field, one that has adopted and adapted ideas from various other disciplines, particularly audience and cultural studies. The disciplines of English and communications interpret fan artifacts, their creation, and the rhetorical strategies they use to make meaning; anthropology and ethnography analyze the fan subculture; media, film, and television studies assess the integration of media into fan practice and artworks; psychology examines fans’ pleasure and motivation; and law analyzes the underlying problems 2 introduction related to the derivative nature of the artworks, including concerns related to copyright, parody, and fair use. The goal of these disciplines is to provide various modes of analysis, which might usefully be divided according to the classic rhetorical situation: What is the focus of the mode of analysis—the creator, the text, the text’s consumer, or some combination of these? In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, we gather together in one place some of the foundational texts of the fan fiction studies corpus. An increasing number of scholars are turning to fan studies to engage their students as a result of the overlap between fan studies and other disciplines related to popular and cultural studies, including social, digital, and transmedia studies. Fan fiction is certainly not the only aspect of fan works and fan engagement important for classroom use, but it is the most extensively studied, and this extensive research can often serve as a base for addressing other aspects of fan studies. We are well aware of the myriad and important aspects of fan studies that focus on (1) other creative fan works (fan art, fan vids, podcasts, cosplay), (2) other sources (games, music, sports), (3) other forms of engagement (collecting , celebrity studies, official fan clubs), (4) fans of texts produced outside Western Anglophone media (anime, J-Pop, K-Pop; the reception of Western texts in non-Western cultures). We have nevertheless chosen to restrict our collection to transformative written works of Western media texts in order to provide a cogent history of one particular strand of fan studies research that has been prolific and influential to both fan and media studies. Even given these restrictions, it is our hope that this volume will be a resource for teaching fandom in the classroom: fan works are readily accessible online, and they often engage students more easily than the professionally produced short stories, novels, TV shows, and films that tend to fill academic courses. Fan fiction studies provides a useful, accessible, and student-friendly site of interrogation for many concerns about producer-consumer relations and resistance, individual and community identity, performativity and online construction of personas, and audience responses and media transformations. Finally, there is the importance of intertextuality within current literature in general and the rising role of fan fiction in particular: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is taught as regularly in college classrooms as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead may not be performed as often...