Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) today released general issue No. 14. The Open Access Gold online multimedia journal has collected scholarly essays, personal essays, and book reviews that seek to bridge fan and academic writers and readers. TWC is published under the umbrella of the nonprofit fan advocacy group Organization for Transformative Works.
This issue will celebrate the anniversary of TWC’s founding issue in September 2008. Looking over their five years, general editors Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson describe how the journal has expanded in focus and responded to changes within fan cultures and fan studies alike. They describe how how the issue “indicates our own expansion to include ever-wider arenas in which fans engage even as we remain focused on the communities and activities that gave rise to this discipline and to this journal in the first place.”
The essays in this issue range from the past to the future, from focus on specific fan engagements and fandoms to general Internet structures and linguistics. Juli J. Parrish’s “Metaphors We Read By: People, Process, and Fan Fiction” and Simon Lindgren’s “Sub*culture: Exploring the Dynamics of a Networked Public” looks for useful model to describe fan communities while Craig Norris and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto look at international media reception and fan tourism. Finally, Emily Regan Wills and Kevin Veale study particular aspects of large fandoms, The X-Files and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic respectively. In all the essays, the relationships among fans, fandom, and the fannish objects are central as is the awareness of geographic and temporal differences.
The Symposium section allows fans and academics to offer shorter ideas and readings. Here the journal offers two personal responses: Whitney Philips describes her enjoyment and investment in Troll 2 and Shannon K. Farley looks over her personal scholarly history to establish the connection between fan fiction and translation studies. Mel Stanfill and Katherine E. Morrissey address recent fannish debates, especially in the wake of the Kindle Worlds announcement, to discuss the role of artistic and communal ownership and the definitions of fan and fan works themselves.
The issue concludes with the reviews of three important books, Accordingly, we include in this issue Melissa Click’s review of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s Spreadable Media, Josh Johnson’s review of Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s Reclaiming Fair Use, and Amanda Retartha’s review of Anne Morey’s important Twilight collection Genre, Reception, and Adaption in the Twilight Series.
For 2014, TWC has planned two themed issues, “Fandom and/as Labor” (guest edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis) and “Materiality and Object-Oriented Fandom” (guest edited by Bob Rehak), as well as No. 17, a general nonthemed issue slated to appear September 15, 2014.