The OTW is proud to announce the release of The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. The brainchild of Transformative Works and Cultures editors Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, the reader is a reprint collection of many key works in the field of fan studies. The Reader is intended for classroom use, but it will also be of interest to people in the field of fan studies.
All royalties for The Fan Fiction Studies Reader will go to the OTW. The OTW supported the project by paying fees for the essays’ reprint rights. (In the case of many such anthologies, these payments are provided by the academic institutions that employ the editors.) Karen and Kristina have written a general introduction as well as brief overviews for each of the book’s four sections. Because of their interest in open access publishing, Karen and Kristina have placed their introduction and the headnotes in the public domain, effective in 10 years’ time.
The essays, which are organized into four thematic sections, address fan-created works as literary artifacts; the relationship between fandom, identity, and feminism; fandom and affect; and the role of creativity and performance in fan activities. Fan works, considered as literary artifacts, pose important questions about the nature of authorship, the meaning of originality, and modes of transmission.
The Fan Fiction Studies Reader is part of the University of Iowa’s newly launched fan studies line. Their university libraries’ special collections department also works with the OTW’s Fan Culture Preservation Project, which preserves fanzines and other nondigital forms of fan culture.