The Fan Fiction Studies Reader
The Fan Fiction Studies Reader is a collection of fan studies essays edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. It is a reprint anthology that republishes earlier scholarship.
This collection shows the historical roots of fan studies, and even as fan studies is expanding and moving in new directions it remains vital to know where we came from in order to understand where we are headed.
All royalties of the reader go to the OTW, which helped finance the reprint fees. Karen and Kristina have written a general introduction as well as brief overviews for each of the book’s four sections. They have placed their introduction and the headnotes in the public domain, effective in 10 years’ time.
The essays are organized into four thematic sections. The first section addresses fan-created works as literary works. The second section discusses the relationship between fandom, identity, and feminism. The third section looks at fandom and affect. The fourth section talks about the role of creativity and performance in fan activities.
The Fan Fiction Studies Reader is part of the University of Iowa’s fan studies line. University of Iowa’s libraries have a special collections department that works with the OTW’s Fan Culture Preservation Project. It preserves fanzines and other nondigital forms of fan culture.
Reviews
“The Fan Fiction Studies Reader is valuable in a number of ways, as a foundational text within classrooms teaching fan studies or media studies, for academics planning to build upon the previous thinking within the multidisciplinary study of fandom, and as a historical document of fan culture for critics and journalists that write about such issues.”
—Keidra Chaney, June 18, 2014. I Read a Book: The Fan Fiction Studies Reader
“Whether we identify fan fiction studies as its own academic field or a subset of other, pre-existing fields (it is, after all, interdisciplinary in nature), The Fan Fiction Studies Reader is a useful resource for students and professional academics. Hellekson and Busse introduce key concepts clearly and without unnecessary jargon, and they select arguably the most important and influential works on fan fiction to date. Even casual readers who don’t take a course on the subject will find the anthology interesting and useful, especially as the internet has allowed nearly everyone to express their fandom in new and exciting ways.”
—Jon Lisi, May 6, 2014. ‘The Fan Fiction Studies Reader’ Offers an Illuminating Overview of an Evolving Field of Study
The Fanfiction Reader
The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for a Digital Age by Francesca Coppa is the first ever fanfiction reader framed to emphasize fanfiction’s unique transformative nature and continuity with other storytelling traditions, with an exploration of specific texts.
Written originally as a fanfiction for the series Twilight, the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey has made obvious what was always clear to fans and literary scholars alike: that it is an essential human activity to read and retell epic stories of famous heroic characters. The Fanfiction Reader showcases the extent to which the archetypal storytelling exemplified by fanfiction has continuities with older forms: the communal tale-telling cultures of the past and the remix cultures of the present have much in common. Short stories that draw on franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, James Bond, and others are accompanied by short contextual and analytical essays wherein Coppa treats fanfiction—a genre primarily written by women and minorities—as a rich literary tradition in which non-mainstream themes and values can thrive.
Royalties of the book are donated to the OTW.
Vidding: A History
The University of Michigan Press also published Vidding: A History by Francesca Coppa and the OTW received a dedicated donation which helped offset the cost to the University of Michigan University Press for Open Access to the text and videos. This text is freely available online.
Vidding: A History emphasizes vidding as a critical, feminist form of fan practice. Working outward from interviews, VHS liner notes, convention programs, and mailing list archives, Coppa offers a rich history of vidding communities as they evolved from the 1970s through to the present. Built with the classroom in mind, the open-access electronic version of this book includes over one-hundred vids and an appendix that includes additional close readings of vids.