Fan fiction and other fan texts have recently gained increasing visibility in both mass media and academic writing. Although numerous insightful essays have appeared in various venues, no comprehensive essay collection has traced the changes and shifts in fan culture and fan fiction since the groundbreaking works of Henry Jenkins, Camille Bacon-Smith, and Constance Penley of the early 1990s. This essay collection, Rethinking Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, looks to complement these crucial early explorations into fan fiction by expanding their scope and focus to include such recent phenomena as the Internet (with fan culture revolving around mailing lists and blogs), the growing acceptability of a contentious subject position, and the community-centered and fraught nature of the creation of fan texts, where the notions of "author" and "reader" tend to conflate. The essays that comprise the volume, all by fans who are also academics, reveal that we inhabit a fluid space that needs to be continuously revised and reconsidered, where new influences, both internal and external, change not only the object of study, but also our theoretical and methodological frameworks. Like the fan text, with complementary and contradictory readings of the source text, the academic text (that is, this book) seeks to describe and understand fandom as it seeks a larger understanding of fan culture. Rather than privileging a particular interpretation as accurate, we have learned from fandom that alternative and competing readings can coexist. We thus use fannish practice as a model for academic practice.
This volume presents twelve essays, averaging 8,000 words each, by fan-scholars all intimately embedded in the milieu of fandom. The introduction provides a listing of fan terms (as a courtesy to the uninformed reader, and to provide a common vocabulary for all the essays that follow); addresses the move of fandom to the Internet, with a particular focus on blogs such as LiveJournal.com; provides a literature review and places the volume in relation to that literature; addresses the notion of subject position as well as goals and methodology; and summarizes the organization of the essays themselves.
The introduction sets up several important points that are echoed throughout the volume: the importance of fandom as a community and the importance of the dual subject position of fan and academic, with neither privileged; the endlessly replicated, collaborative, always provisional nature of the reading and creation of fan texts; and the complicity of technological advances in the forms that fannish expression takes. It is supplemented by "A Brief History of Media Fandom" that traces the last forty years of media fandom looking at some of the more popular media texts and its fandoms as well as general community dynamics and changes throughout the decades.
The essays themselves, written by a variety of people, mostly women who make their living as scholars, are grouped into four parts of three essays each. Part 1, Different Approaches: Fan Fiction in Context, situates fan fiction in its historical, literary, and generic context. Part 2, Characters, Style, Text: Fan Fiction as Literature, focuses on fan fiction as text to be read with the same strategies used to read professionally published fiction. Part 3, Readers and Writers: Fan Fiction and Community, stresses the dense interaction between readers and writers as meaning is created. The role of beta readers in making meaning is addressed, and fan text as performance is dealt with. Finally, Part 4, Medium and Message: Fan Fiction and Beyond, moves away from the narrative view of fan fiction as it describes new forms of fannish engagement in its discussion of fans' cooption of new media by showing how fans use The Sims and machinima to tell stories, thus emphasizing that new technologies will result in new art forms that change the dynamic of the fan community.
