Fan fiction and premodern literature:
Methods and definitions
Anna Wilson
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United
States
[0.1] Abstract—Itis a cliché of any introduction to fan fiction to claim its precursors
in canonical authors, including Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, and Milton. But
what does it mean to call the Aeneid or the Divine Comedy fan fiction? What kinds of
analyses might such an approach generate? A survey of the nascent field of premodern
fan fiction studies reveals three main axes of approaches to reading premodem literature
through the lens of fan fiction (poaching, transformation, and affect), which are
organized in turn around different definitions of fan fiction, suggesting one possible
interdisciplinary theoretical model. Rather than focusing on the selection of canonical
texts, this burgeoning and vibrant field of study must instead focus on developing its
methodology.
{0.2] _Keyword—Afeet theory; Classical studies; Early modem studies; Fan fiction
research; Medieval studies; Queer theory
Wilson, Anna. 2021, "Fan Fiction and Premodern Literature: Methods and Definitions." Transformative
Works and Cultures, no. 36. https://doi,org/10.3983/twe.2021,2037.
1. Introductio
Fan fiction and premodern literature
[1.1] A 2014 webcomic by R. E. Parrish that went viral in fan fiction communities depicts a man in
medieval Italian dress, writing on parchment with a Mona Lisa~esque smile on his face (figure 1).
Figure 1. R. E. Parrish. October 7, 2014. https:/ireparrishcomics.comv/image/99437760558.
[1.2] The (divine?) comedy of this web comic lies in juxtaposing one of the most important works in
the Western literary canon with not just fan fiction but Mary Sue fic, the subgenre most often
stereotyped as clumsily written teenage erotic fantasies. And yet, behind the joke lies a compelling and
oftemade observation about fundamental similarities between fan fiction and the intertextuality of
premodern literary culture (note 1). It is a cliché of primers on fan fiction to trace it back to authors like
Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Virgil, and Dante. Comparisons between fan fiction and premodern
literature are also common in classrooms. Assigning students to write a new Canterbury tale, for
example, is a common assignment, By making this comparison, teachers can make space for students to
repurpose the hermeneutics of adaptation that they have developed within fan communities to read early
modern, medieval, and classical literature that they may otherwise find inaccessible. Moreover, anemerging field of premodern fan fiction studies has shown the potential of taking seriously this
juxtaposition of fan fiction with much older literatures, but it has yet to reach any kind of consensus on
‘methodology, in part because of unaddressed but fundamental disagreements on exactly what fan fiction
is
[1.3] _ In order to talk about premodem fan fiction, we must first answer the question, "What are the
essential qualities of fan fiction, and which are transposable beyond its twentieth- and twenty-first
century cultural contexts and can be applied to the literatures of other times and places?" This article,
inspired by the "Fan Studies Methodologies" special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures edited
by Julia E. Largent, Milena Popova, and Elise Vist (2020), proposes three methodological paradigms for
premodern fan fiction studies, with the hope of being useful to readers interested in practicing this
interdisciplinary work in their research or pedagogy. I describe three theoretical axes along which we
might read historical texts through the lens of fan fiction: poaching, transformation, and affect. These
three axes each correspond to different definitions of fan fiction, each of which foregrounds different
characteristics: its legal status, its relationship with other texts, and its relationship with readers (note 2).
Although I have worked most with the affect axis, I don’t propose that any of these approaches is more
valid than the others. Each opens up different avenues of historical research. The poaching axis points
toward institutions of textual authority, transformation toward formal elements of literature, and affect
toward historical reading communities. By laying out what I see as these three axes of approach, I hope
to offer more theoretical clarity for future work on premodem fan fiction.
[1.4] _Inreading premodem literature as fan fiction, there is more at stake than historical accuracy.
While Parrish's comie perhaps leans more toward poking fun at the /nferno than suggesting that "My
Immortal" should be taught alongside it, its humor partly arises from the tension between these two
possibilities. Suggesting that august canonical authors like Dante wrote fan fiction may serve to
puncture reverence for a literary canon that still dominates high school and university curricula; it could
equally make an argument for fan fiction's place in that canon. Indeed, claiming authors like
Shakespeare and Virgil as fan fiction’s literary ancestors has had significant strategic value for defenses
of fan fiction's artistic validity and even legality: one of the earliest published defenses of fan fiction
under US copyright law, Rebecca Tushnet's 1997 article "Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a
New Common Law," references Harold Ogden White's seminal 1935 book Plagiarism and Imitation
During the English Renaissance as part of its argument (652). In that same article, we hear from a fan
who spoke with a lawyer for Fox Broadcasting: "I went on to talk about how many of the works of
Chaucer and Shakespeare were fan fiction...and that the entirety of Western literature emerged from an
oral tradition that is at its basis fan fiction" (quoted in Tushnet 1997, 656). Fan fiction's real or imagined
relationship to premodern literature has had, and will continue to have, real-world consequences for fan
fiction’s legal and cultural circumstances. This makes interrogating the basis of this relationship
essential, not only for scholars of premodern fan fiction but for fan fiction studies in general
[1.5] Any approach to premodem fan fiction must begin by assessing the limits of transhistorical
comparison. Fan fiction is an historically situated literary form, shaped by a postcopyright, postprint,
post-age-of-reproduction cultural landscape. The term "fan fiction” has existed since only the 1960s,
and while it flourished in amateur printed zines for the first twenty or thirty years of its existence, its
primary medium shifted with technological and legal changes in the 1990s, and it can now firmly be
called a digital literature. It circulates for free in what has been called a gift economy but is intimately
bound up with the media marketplace under late capitalism (De Kosnik 2009; Guarriello 2019;
Hellekson 2009; Turk 2014). Fan fiction is also closely associated with a community with specific
demographics that do not easily map onto many premodern reading communities. The members of fan
fiction communities on whom fan studies has tended to focus—online, Anglophone, focused on
Western media sources—are almost all cis women or people of minoritized genders, including trans
men and women and people who identify as gender nonbinary, genderfluid, or agender. Many fan
fiction readers and writers in these communities are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, the
majority are white, and a far higher percentage than in the general population identify as LGBTQA+,
queer, or otherwise of a sexual minority (note 3). Given all this, applying the term "fan fiction” to
the Aeneid or Paradise Lost based on a single shared trait—that they take characters or worlds from
other texts—risks eliding so much specificity as to strip the term "fan fiction" of almost all meaning,
And yet, two special issues of Transformative Works and Cultures in 2016 and 2019, and two
conferences in England in 2018 and 2019, as well as numerous individual panels and papers at otherconferences, have been dedicated to exploring the possibilities of transhistorical analogies between fan
fiction and premodem literature (note 4), So, what are we doing when we read premodern literature
through fan fiction, or when we say that Dante's Inferno "is" fan fiction? How do we bring these two
radically different literary fields together in a meaningful way?
2. Axis 1: Poaching
[2.1] Henry Jenkins's seminal book on fan fiction, Textual Poachers (1992), laid the ground for
characterizing fan fiction primarily by its relationship to legal and social frameworks around the
ownership of ideas. Camille Bacon-Smith’s classic ethnography of fan fiction writers likewise opens,
albeit flippantly, by portraying these fans as both "ladies of literary society" and "terrorists" (1992, 4).
‘The more recent definition of fan fiction as "transformative work," terminology drawing on language
from the US legal system and popularized by the Organization of Transformative Works, reweights but
does not substantially change Jenkins's "poaching" framework (Tushnet 2007). Since fan fiction’s legal
status has been perhaps the most important deciding factor in determining the shape of its distribution
networks and communities, it is understandable that defining fan fiction, first and foremost, as
unauthorized continues to be the most common approach. So, for example, Catherine Tosenberger’s
definition of fan fiction begins with its "recursivity” (its relationship to other texts) but further
distinguishes fan fiction from other kinds of recursive literature following Jenkins's template: "Fan
fiction is recursive literature that, whether out of preference or necessity, circulates outside of the
‘official’ institutional setting of commercial publishing" (2014, 16).
[2.2] This definition would seem of limited value for historians of premodem literature, situated as it
is within a postcopyright legal system and late-stage capitalism, although it offers rich veins of inquiry
for the emergence of the professional author, the amateur reader, and fan communities in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, where these systems begin to emerge (Lynch 2015; Simonova 2012).
However, Jenkins's central metaphor of poaching is rooted in the premodern, For Jenkins, fans resemble
the poachers of old” (1992, 26); fans hungry for media steal from large media conglomerates as hungry
medieval peasants stole from landowners who hunted only for sport, In this metaphor, copyright is
analogous to the medieval enclosure of the commons, a practice that restricted hunting and grazing
rights to landowners, which in England began in around the thirteenth century CE and shaped the
relationship of the people with the land well into the nineteenth century. The poaching metaphor evokes
a heroic folk lineage including figures like Robin Hood (note 5) and situates fandom in a kind of
Sherwood Forest, a marginal, unregulated, premodern space. The activity of fandom, in this metaphor,
is the moral theft of texts and ideas from their wealthy owners and their return to a nostalgically
imagined prior communality. Fans are decidedly not compared, in Jenkins's book, to modern-day
poachers killing endangered big game for black market profit or illegally harvesting rare wild orchids—
indeed, comparing these modern poachers to fan fiction writers would transfer the moral authority to the
interpretive authorities and media owners against whom Jenkins's fans rebel. The book's original cover,
a piece of fan art by Jean Kluge that depicts characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94)
in medieval costumes that evoke Arthuriana, prepares the reader for the implicit medieval setting of
Jenkins's fan-poacher (figure 2).Figure 2. Cover of Textual Poachers, featuring art by Jean Kluge (characters featured from Star Trek:
The Next Generation are, from left, Beverley Crusher, Tasha Yar, Data, and Jean-Luc Picard).
[2.3] _Jenkins's definition derives from de Certeau’s (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, where the
premodern setting appears with even more suggestive force. De Certeau writes of the common reader:
"Far from being writers—founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working
on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—readers are travellers; they move
across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not
write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves" (1984, 174). In the passages leading up to
this section, De Certeau introduces a dizzying series of metaphors, in which the common reader is the
traveler in the modern nation-state receiving a passport from interpretive authorities to enter the text in
the correct way (171), then a trespasser on a "private hunting reserve" (171), then, in a strange role-
reversal in this colonial fantasy, "a Robinson Crusoe discovering an island" (173), then a hunter ina
forest (173), a modern-day Amazon or Ulysses (174), and finally, a "nomad" (174). De Certeau's
temporal collapse makes his reader simultaneously a medieval Robin Hood resisting the dissolution of
the English commons after the Norman conquest, an early modem settler colonist who imagines the
lands she colonizes to be "premodern" (i.c., either not-yet-modern or not-yet-settled), and a "nomad," a
figure evoking both indigenous populations of colonized states and persecuted nomadic European
communities like the Roma, The premodem blurs into the postcolonial here in troubling and complex
‘ways that Jenkins sidesteps through his partial excerpt of this quote (1992, 26). Jenkins does include de
Certeau's final flourish, the allusion to the gold from Egypt, in which his common reader becomes St.
Augustine's Christian reader of pagan classical texts. In On Christian Doctrine 11.40, St. Augustine
famously compares Christian readers of classical (pagan) philosophers to the Israelites who flee Egypt
with the looted treasures of their former captors in Exodus 12 (note 6). This final allusion returns us to
the premodern and to an early theory of reception that would legitimize medieval literary adaptation of
classical sources.
[2.4] Tangled in the roots of Jenkins's poacher metaphor is the premodern past. Both Jenkins
(implicitly) and de Certeau (explicitly) compare fans to premodern subjects who evaded, resisted, and
occupied the margins of different interpretive authorities and institutional powers. Both connect the
commons of fandom to the commons of premodern law, and both, to different degrees, situate their
theorized reader in an imaginary, nostalgic premodernity. This association between the communal
ownership of stories and the imagined premodern is built into the foundations of fan studies built on
Jenkins's work, which itself drew on the self-understanding of the fan communities he studied.
[2.5] This is the axis of approach taken by most of the contributors to the 2019 Transformative Works
and Cultures (TWC) special issue "Fan Fiction & Ancient Scribal Cultures," edited by Frauke
Uhlenbruch and Sonja Ammann. As the editors write in their introduction, "fan studies provide
excellent heuristic tools for exploring questions of textual authority and for foregrounding the role of
the audience/fans in the production of texts and traditions" (2019, § 1.2). The editors come to their
transhistorical analogy through a different route than Jenkins: the influence of nineteenth-century
biblical scholarship on early twentieth-century Sherlock Holmes fandom, In "Studies in the Literature of
Sherlock Holmes" (1999 [1911]), by Ronald A. Knox, a popular theologian and mystery novelist(perhaps now best known to mystery novel fans for his "Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction"
[1929], Knox applies the methods and terminology of scholarship on ancient literature, particularly
biblical texts, to the Sherlock Holmes stories, to ridiculous effect. His paper enters into the fiction that,
Watson is the author of biographical sketches of a real detective. What are obviously small errors in
consistency on the part of Doyle and his editors are treated as evidence of multiple authors, including
‘Deutero-Watson" and "proto- Watson," and a whole scholarly field is invented in a pastiche of German-
style biblical textual criticism, together with German-sounding fictional scholars: "The 'Gloria Scott’ is
condemned by Backnecke partly on the ground of the statement that Holmes was only up for two years
at College, while he speaks in the 'Musgrave Ritual’ of 'my last years’ at the University; which
Backnecke supposes to prove that the two stories do not come from the same hand" (Knox 1999
[1911].
[2.6] While obviously tongue in cheek, this piece was hailed in later years as the originator of a
certain genre of fan criticism (Lellenberg 2011; Sveum and Lellenberg 2010). It was influential in two.
ways: its borrowing of terms from Christian biblical scholarship (so that the Holmes tales become the
Sacred Writings) and its conceit that rather than being authored by Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock
Holmes writings were documents of true events, authored by John Watson, with Doyle relegated to a
literary agent. The distinction between Doyleian and Watsonian readings—that is, between readings that
acknowledge that one is reading a work of fiction and readings that enter into the fiction of the text to
treat it as a true document of real events—has had long currency in some fan criticism circles. Another
influential early fan-writer on Sherlock Holmes was Dorothy L. Sayers, whose training was in medieval
literature and who would go on to translate Dante's Divine Comedy (in addition to her more famous
mystery novels). A cofounder of two early Holmes fan societies in 1934, Sayers wrote several pieces of
Sherlock Holmes fan criticism (meta) and what is arguably a piece of fan fiction wherein her own
creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, meets Sherlock Holmes (Sayers 2001). The influence of methods from the
study of premodern literature on Sherlock Holmes fandom, and from thence to other fandoms, thus
came from several directions, the end result of which was a foundation for a kind of fan criticism that
treats fan texts as premodern—that is, that participates in a shared, playful imagining that such texts
exist outside of structures of copyright and the capitalist marketplace, and thus can be read through the
heuristics developed to read premodern texts.
[2.7] Inthe "poaching" axis of approach, stories are understood primarily but not exclusively as
property, so scholarship focuses on the relationships between texts and systems of ownership. This axis
offers a useful lens for reading premodern literature with a focus on ownership, censorship, and
questions of authority, authorship, influence, patronage, circulation, reception, cultural prestige, and
hierarchies of canonicity that assign different values to different texts (and hence change the value
attached to authoring or otherwise owning them). Several contributors to the 2019 "Fan Fiction and
Ancient Scribal Cultures" issue of TWC argue that the concepts and terminology around authorship and
canonicity that fan criticism has developed over the past hundred years, initially derived from biblical
criticism, can in tum contribute to the study of early biblical canon formation (Amsler 2019a; Rosland
2019; Uhlenbruch and Ammann 2019) and to the study of reception and response in Midrashic literature
and the Talmud (Amsler 2019b; Barenblat 2014, 2019). Applying fan approaches to historical texts
requires some recalibration, and many of the articles in both the aforementioned special issue and
TWC's 2016 special issue, "The Classical Canon and/as Transformative Work," edited by Ika Willis,
tackle the problem of methodology. In her discussion of the relationship of translation to fan fiction,
using translations of Homer as an example, Shannon Farley (2016) uses André Lefevre's concept of
“systems” to describe the unique set of circumstances, influences, and pressures that shape any textual
interpretation, including both translation and fan fiction. Ahuvia Kahane (2016) compares the process of
canon formation in ancient Greek oral literary culture and in fan communities through a careful
definition of terms in order not to efface but rather to highlight nuances of historical difference, Both
Kahane's and Farley's articles use fan fiction to discuss process and relationality; the poaching axis
lends itself to analyses such as these of where, how, and why interpretation, rewriting, and adaptation
happens, or any process in which there is a negotiation of interpretive authority. The second axis of
approach—transformation—lends itself more to analysis of the texts that result from these processes, to
the aesthetics of transformative literature.
3. Axis 2: Transformation[3.1] The comparisons in the popular press between fan fiction and the Aeneid, Hamlet, Paradise
Lost, and other premodem texts are often made on the basis of fan fiction’s formal properties, as
literature which rewrites, adapts, extends, borrows from, or interpolates other literature. Catherine
Tosenberger (2014), following David Langford, calls this type of literature "recursive" (an alternative
term to "transformative" or to Abigail Derecho's [2006] proposal, “archontic," which I will discuss
below) (note 8). Tosenberger (2014, 14) points out that while fan fiction has been compared to both
premodern literature and to folk tales and oral traditions, she prefers the former as a model, because
premodern literature aesthetically values recursivity, while recursivity is baked into form of folklore:
[3.2] Because "repetition" is built into the very concept of the category, folk narratives do
not need to be explicitly marked the way that recursive literary texts do, since the latter
battle with the Romantic conception of originality as a marker of aesthetic quality. Indeed,
the Romantic conception of folklore is in direct opposition to the Romantic conception of
art; folk narratives were constructed as valuable precisely because of their lack of
originality—that is, their status as presumed survivals from an earlier age. These separate
hierarchies of value were used to downplay or denigrate recursivity in literature (as
unoriginal) and innovation in folk narrative (as inauthentic).
[3.3] Tosenberger’s (2014, 14) explanatory examples for recursive literature include several familiar
premodern texts: "Paradise Lost, much of the Arthurian corpus, many of Shakespeare's
plays, Ulysses, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Wide Sargasso Sea, and so on." Because she
focuses on transformation’s artistic characteristics, Tosenberger distinguishes folklore from recursive
literature. But many comparisons between fan fiction and premodern literature that use poaching as
their axis of approach often collapse together folklore and myth with recursive literature, because they
are foregrounding the concept of an imaginative commons. In the discourse that Ika Willis (2016, § 2.2—
4) analyses, "the use of the term myth. .specifically invokes a folkloric model linked to a particular
understanding of intellectual and cultural property...One of the key functions of the appeal to myth (or
legend) here is to refuse or deny one of the most obvious differences between ancient myth and
contemporary mass culture: the economic conditions of its production and circulation, Unlike Robin
Hood and Odysseus, Han Solo is trademarked; his name and likeness are the intellectual property of
Lucasfilm." In some ways, it is crudely artificial to distinguish intertextuality in premodern literature as
a moral or legal category from intertextuality as an artistic mode, since these distinctions are themselves
rooted in twenty-first-century law, ethics, and art, Be that as it may, for fan fiction studies, arguments
that treat premodern literature as a literature that treats ideas and texts as communal are often distinct
from arguments that treat premodern literature as a literature that values transformation. It is this second
axis of approach with which I am now concerned and that I will call transformation,
3.4] In the name "The Organization for Transformative Works," the term "transformative" asserts
that fan fiction occupies a legal category of artistic works (including, for example, parody, or reviews
that quote the original work) that have sufficiently transformed another property as to not be in violation
of copyright (Tushnet 2007, 61). However, fans and fan scholars often also use the term
"transformative" in place of counter-terms like "appropriative" or "derivative," where the operative
discourse is not legal or even moral but aesthetic. Here, the term "transformative" serves to argue that
originality is not the be-all and end-all of artistic practice, as well as that fan fiction as art—legal
considerations aside—does not necessarily occupy a place below its source in a cultural or artistic
hierarchy. These analyses focus on the formal and narrative elements of fan fiction—the ways in which
it transforms its source and to what effect. Analyses that define fan fiction as first and foremost
transformative also often favor expansive definitions of fan fiction that include modern published
fiction that transforms source texts whose copyright has expired. Such texts share some formal qualities
with fan fiction but were not created within fan communities; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead and Wide Sargasso Sea are probably the most frequently given examples (see, e.g., Pugh 2004,
194-95).
[3.5] _ Abigail Derecho's influential 2006 article "Archontic Literature: A Definition, A History, and
Several Theories of Fan Fiction" offers "archontic" (from "archive") as a useful term for theorizing fan
fiction. This term proposes a different relationship between source and fan fiction than cultural, artistic,
or even temporal primacy. Following the Derridean concept of the virtual archive, within the archontic
model, all texts are unstable, containing limitless potentialities (Derecho 2006, 75). Fan fiction of Prideand Prejudice, in this model, shares a virtual archive with all the different printings and editions of Jane
‘Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the various Pride and Prejudice television adaptations, translations
of Pride and Prejudice into other languages, P. D. James's 2011 novel Death Comes To Pemberley, Seth
Grahame-Smith’s 2009 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the 2008 television series Lost in
Austin, and even more fragmentary artifacts like gifs of Colin Firth emerging from a pond in a clinging
white shirt, cloth shopping bags depicting a dustjacket of Pride and Prejudice, and so on. The
usefulness of this term lies in its radical dehierarchizing of the relationship between fan fiction and its
source text, an important precursor for critical analysis; unlike "transformative," "archontic" also
articulates fan fiction’s relationship with other paratexts, Tosenberger (2014, 15) argues that "recursive"
"marks a specific, and active, relationship between texts," and so prefers it to "archontic," which she
sees as a more passive descriptor: "'archontic' refers to a space; 'recursive' refers to an action." I have
chosen "transformative" for this axis less out of preference for it as a term and more because it is more
widely used than either "recursive" or “archontic," both of which overlap significantly with
“transformative” in meaning.
[3.6] _ What may seem like haggling over terminology here points to the very reason why analogies
between fan fiction and premodern literature have the potential to be so productive—because attention
to how and why we might compare them forces us to rescrutinize what, precisely, a text, genre, or a
literature is, and what makes it so. For example, fan fiction troubles the reader/writer binary, drawing
attention to the ways in which readers collectively reauthor texts through marginal annotation and
commentary, textual editing, translation, and other interpretive acts. Fan fiction’s authorial
indeterminaey—which is actually a failure to fit into categories of authorship shaped by the marketplace
—demands reexamination of what we mean by authorship in a way that is particularly productive for
premodern texts, where authorship is often collective and highly complex, All three of these competing
and overlapping terms for what fan fiction is—recursive, archontic, transformative—direct attention to
the literary techniques around which fan fiction communities have developed huge and highly specific
taxonomies. Take, for example, the range of microgenres within fan fiction, such as "curtainfic,” which
names a story with domestic details and a comforting affect, in which characters from the source text,
usually in a happy relationship, do domestic tasks, often centered around cultivating their shared space,
such as shopping for curtains ("Curtainfic" n.d.), or the seven main types and more than thirty-five
subtypes of “alternate universe" fan fiction named on the Fanlore wiki page ("Alternate Universe," n.d.)
This taxonomy is literary theory: it is the product of decades of communal debate about how specific
kinds of narrative work and how the foot traffic of fan readers creates desired paths through source
texts. Genre here emerges from the ways in which readers respond to preexisting texts or storyworlds
rather than from publishing categories or cultural technologies like literary prizes, offering a helpful
way to approach the highly problematic subject of genre in premodern texts.
[3.7] _ Parrish’s web comic draws on the literary theory of fandom for its reading of Dante. It implicitly
reads Dante's Divine Comedy as fan fiction not only because of broadly shared transformative qualities
but as a specific kind of transformation that has a name and a body of scholarship within fandom but not
outside it: Mary Sue fic (Busse 2016). For the knowledgeable fan reader, the comic invokes the Mary
Sue as a heuristic tool with which to gather for discussion the aesthetics, ethics, cultural valences, and
narrative repercussions of Dante's appearance in his own work as a character in a relationship with a
celebrated author of whom he is a fan, What happens when we imagine Dante into the debased,
gendered position of a fan? What happens to the Divine Comedy if we read it through the lens of the
Mary Sue? In an as-yet unpublished paper, Ika Willis (2010, 17) does just this, placing both Dante and
the Mary Sue in conversation with Barthes, arguing that the relationship between Dante and Virgil
thinks through "the reorganization of the text according to the reader's desire, and, especially, the
production of a space of address between the text and the reader which addresses the reader as
unsubstitutable, unique subject.”
[3.8] _ The transformative axis of approach is productive with premodern literary texts that circulate in
conversation with other adaptations of the same source, such as medieval romances. For example,
Angela Florscheutz's (2019, 11) article on the fourteenth-century Middle English romance Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight argues that the poem “invites attention to its own status as a work of archontic
literature, or literature that draws and builds upon previously existing textual worlds and that allows for
unlimited expansions to the textual conglomeration or archive.” She argues that the poem gains much of
its literary effect and humor from its refusal to conform to its contemporary audience's expectations ofGawain and stories about Gawain, In this reading, characters in the poem ventriloquize the fans of
Gawain poems, who make up the audience, and likewise voice their disappointment and chagrin when
he does not perform. Ultimately, Florscheutz uses the comparison with fan fiction to unpack the poem's
playful exploration of interpretive authority. The fan fiction lens guides analysis not only of the poem's
transformation of its sources, but its interest in the friction between the Gawain fans—such as Lady
Bertilak, who accuses the unexpectedly prudish Gawain, "pat 3e be gawan hit gotz in mynde" (1. 1293; 1
suspect you of not being Gawain)—and Gawain's struggle to adhere to his own moral code.
[3.9] Analysis of fan fiction as a literary genre has most often gravitated toward fan fiction that
extends the pleasures of the source text by resisting and challenging it. Through fan fiction, Ika Willis
(2006, 155) writes, the reader can "make space for her own desires in a text which may not at first
provide the resources to sustain them.” Much fan fiction is dedicated to imagining same-sex romances
between main characters who are depicted in the source text as straight and cis, drawing out queer
valences in traditionally homosocial but heteronormative media genres like police procedurals. Lothian,
Busse, and Reid in 2007 posited "slash fandom" (note 9) as a "queer female space," an argument taken
up by De Kosnik in her discussions of fan fiction archives (206, 145-53; Busse 2006; Lothian, Busse,
and Reid 2007). "Queer" here is a capacious category going beyond a specific sexual orientation or
identity, functioning more as a shorthand for the proliferation of marginalized desires, identities, and
bodies that fan fiction reads into source texts. What Alexis Lothian has called "critical fandom" uses
creative transformation to recenter voices, perspectives, or identities at the edges of the source text, or
by reimagining the voices at its center (Lothian 2018). For example, andré m. carrington (2016, 197)
analyses fan fiction that centers minor (in terms of narrative space and screen time) Black characters
in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Harry Potter (1997-), arguing that these fan works
“dislodge tropes of fantasy from a British cultural frame of reference that is presumptively identical to
Whiteness," while Jonathan A. Rose (2020, 28) argues that fan fiction for the BBC
show Sherlock (2010-17) that imagines the character of John Watson as a trans man draws attention to
trans embodiment and so “destabilizes cisnormative readings of popular culture."
[3.10] Approaches to premodern literature that foreground the narrative aspects of fan fiction often
use the critical tools developed in fan fiction communities and fan studies to reclaim voices from the
margins—sometimes the literal margins, as in Kavita Mudan Finn's (2017) reading of early modern
paratexts and the Archive of Our Own. E. J. Nielsen's (2017) reading of Christine de Pizan's early
fifteenth-century Book of the City of the Ladies applies tools from the study of fan fiction to Christine's
critique of misogynist historiography, while Balaka Basu (2016) draws out the queer valences of Sir
Philip Sydney's Arcadia as fan fiction. Finn and McCall (2016, 34), in their discussion of modern fan
fiction of Shakespeare, argue that the extrainstitutional, extracanonical spaces in which fan fiction
circulates open up spaces for "creative misteadings," wherein fandom's norms of interpretive play make
possible critical pathways that the norms of critical scholarship do not (see also Fazel and Geddes
2016).
[3.11] Critiques by scholars whose work intersects with critical race theory have introduced important
critiques of how fan studies scholarship, and particularly analysis along the axis of transformation, has
often failed to be intersectional. These scholars note that while fan fiction’s transformative readings may
resist or subvert their source text's representation of gender and sexuality, they may affirm ideologies of
normative whiteness (Pande 2018; Stanfill 2011; Wanzo 2015; Woo 2018). Positioning the fan as
marginal within a cultural hierarchy, Pande (2018, 28) writes, "is increasingly leading to arguments that
maintain that the very act of identifying as a fan somehow makes white cisgender women participants in
these spaces less privileged on an institutional level, or less culpable for holding and perpetuating ideas
rooted in racism." The tendency to imagine fandom as always transformative and transformation as
always liberatory has had a limiting effect on premodem fan fiction studies, making it difficult, for
example, to imagine using fan fiction paradigms in relation to complex and troubling literature like
English religious drama. Texts like the York Cycle crucifixion pageant transform the text of the Gospels
into community theatre, empowering local actors to inhabit, explore, and even subvert biblical
scriptures while also constituting their audience as a Christian polity in part by means of ritualized
antisemitism. The critiques of Pande (2018), Stanfill (2011), Wanzo (2015), Woo (2018), and others
draw a crucial distinction between unauthorized reading and resistive reading. They challenge us to
refine fan fiction-based approaches to premodern literatures with intersectional analyses that
acknowledge multiple axes of marginalization and cultural authority. This challenge can also shape anapproach to texts that explore a minoritized reading position and yet also reaffirm hegemonic
orthodoxies, as I will describe in the next section,
[3.12] Pande's (2018) critique also highlights how transformative fan fiction and its scholarship has
been embedded in a politics of affect that affirms the circulation of pleasure and desire between women
fans whose whiteness is presumed. Disrupting that presumption interrupts the circulation of pleasure.
Pande (2018, 13) draws on Sarah Ahmed's model of the feminist killjoy to theorize "what it means to be
a fandom killjoy—that is, for one's pleasure to threaten the invocation of a woman-centric, and queer~
coded community." Nicholas-Brie Guarriello (2019, € 5.16) argues that "Coliver" fan fiction for the
show How to Get Away with Murder (2014-20) "reaffirm[s] a neoliberal mandate for happiness," as the
affective economies of fandom incentivize authors to produce frictionless, "fluffy" romance stories
about this queer interracial couple that effectively erase any discussion of race or cultural difference that
might raise specters of discomfort, thus reinforcing normative whiteness. Building on earlier, critical
race theory-informed critiques of fandom, fan fiction, and fan studies, Guarriello's (2019) analysis,
disrupts the assumption of a universalized fan reader (imagined by default to be white, female, and,
often, heterosexual) in transformative rewritings that focus on bodies and embodiment. It also shows
how the affective politics of fandom shapes the transformative work fan fiction can do.
[3.13] ‘These questions provoke attention to how our own investment as critics in transformative fan
fiction as liberatory may unduly influence which medieval texts we feel comfortable calling fan fiction.
More, Guarriello's (2019) critique marks a point of intersection between the transformative axis of
approach to fan fiction and the final axis I will discuss: affect. This approach focuses on reader
positionality and the kinds of reading communities within which fan fiction is embedded.
4. Axis 3: Affect
[4.1] | While embedded in an almost wholly digital landscape, modern fan fiction is a literature of
embodied experiences, both those of the fictional characters and those of the authors, who cultivate
somatic responses like tears or arousal in their readers. Authors also often explicitly use fan fiction to
process, narrativize, and explore their own experiences of gender transition, disability, sexuality, and
trauma. Fan fiction emerges from and is circulated within reading communities that are passionately and
intimately involved with their source texts, communities for whom deep familiarity with a text cannot
be easily separated from practices of self-fashioning or from ties of friendship, love, and animosity with
other fans or with source text creators, fictional characters, actors, and other celebrities (note 10). The
affective reading practices common in fandom and of the romance genre more generally are heavily
gendered as feminine, and many of the fan communities that produce fan fiction—those attached to
popular music groups, television and movie celebrities, and novels with romantic content—are
historically associated with young women, as in iconic images such as the screaming crowds of girls at
Beatles concerts (Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs 1992; Huyssen 1986; Lahti and Nash 1999). The
original Mary Sue, in Paula Smith's 1973 parody of self-insert Star Trek fan fiction, proudly proclaims
that she is "fifteen and a half years old" (Walker 2011); this most quintessential fan fiction trope is
indelibly associated with inept teenage gir! fan writers in part because of Smith's satire, Fan fiction,
therefore, is not only gendered as a literary form, but also aged. It is associated with an immature
emotional life—with immoderate passion, unrequited crushes, a preference for fantasy over reality, and
inappropriate or transitional object choices for one's desires outside of the heteropatriarchal structures of
adult reproduction.
[4.2] Fannishness is, in this sense, a queer mode that both resides in and generates around itself a
queer temporality: rhythms of life that are at odds with the linear progress of heteronormative life-paths
and with full (adult) participation in capitalist society (Dinshaw 1999, 2012; Edelman 2004; Freeman
2010; Halberstam 2005). Fannishness's queemness is inseparable from the fact that the great majority of
fan fiction readers and writers identify outside of cis masculinity or heterosexuality and are young, in
their teens or early twenties (see note 1), and that much fan fiction deals with same-sex romance. The
heavy identification of fan fiction with feminine or feminizing reading practices, marginalized gender
expressions and sexual identities, and immaturity or youngness represents a significant divergence from
the now-familiar list of high culture texts by Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce, and so on, In Parrish
reimagining, the fan and fan fiction are interconnected: Dante's fantasy about Virgil becomes a teenagegirl's fantasy, signified by visual markers like the florid cursive and the pale pink bedroom, as well as
the interaction with his mother, which reveals an infantilizing living situation. It is not only
the Jnferno's form that makes it fan fiction but also Dante's desire for intimacy with the long-dead poet
Virgil, a desire which is queer in that it is same-sex but also queer in its temporality, Reading Dante as a
Mary Sue author, here, opens up questions about the circumstances of the /nferno's composition, the
community in which it circulated, the importance of parasocial relationships in early humanist circles,
and even the invisibility of women's labor in the single-author model (who made Dante's meals?).
[4.3] _ The affect axis of approach, therefore, primarily defines fan fiction not by its relationship to
copyright or authorial ownership, nor by its formal elements of adaptation, but by its production within
a community oriented around shared affects. This community occupies a position outside of
heteronormative masculinity through its affective mode, which is related to but not identical with its
demographic makeup. The affect axis of approach to premodern fan fiction might direct attention
toward, for example, the circulation of texts as objects of exchange or gifts within an exclusive reading
community, the materiality of such texts as objects of care, the structures of feeling within and around
texts, or the self-fashioning of members of a particular reading community around their textual
affiliations. It also particularly directs attention toward the history of women's reading, to historic queer
and other marginalized communities, and to the complex intertwinings of identity and reading through
history.
[4.4] Paradoxically, therefore, scholarship in fan studies that is most interested in fan fiction as a
historically and technologically situated literature (e.g., in zines, digital archives, online gift exchanges,
or social media platforms) can offer better models for some kinds of premodern fannish reading than
studies of fan fiction that follow the axes of poaching or transformation, as they offer theorizations of
fan fiction, first and foremost, as a literature of affective communities (note 11). Because this third axis
privileges affect, both public and private, it directs the gaze toward readers’ bodies. Here, of course, it
overlaps with other approaches to fan fiction: the first axis (poaching) can lead to a focus on reading
communities via its attentiveness to social institutions and cultural hierarchies, and the second axis
(transformation) can also lead to a focus on readers via its interest in fan fiction as space in which to
recenter identities and voices marginalized in mainstream media texts. However, the third axis (affect)
places fan reading communities and their reading practices and hermeneutics at the center of analysis,
[4.5] Ihave argued elsewhere that fan fiction is a kind of affective reception—"reception organized
around feeling" (Wilson 2016a, { 1.2)—and have compared it with, among other medieval literatures, a
genre of English Christian devotional literature of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries that guides its
readers (often Women) to imagine themselves as characters in the Gospels and to fill in missing scenes
in biblical narrative. Devotional guides like Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ and the
text on which it is based, the Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditations on the Life of Christ (Meditationes
vitae Christi), Aelted of Rievaulx's Rule of Life for a Recluse (De institutione inclusarum), the
anonymous Ancrene Wisse, and accounts of the lives of religious women, like the writings of Bridget of
Sweden and The Book of Margery Kempe, not only transform biblical narrative but also theorize this,
process of creative transformation as a devotional act that is itself gendered and also placed low ona
cultural hierarchy, Reading these texts as fan fiction allows us to focus on the ways these texts teach
transformative literary techniques—that is, they teach their readers how to mentally compose their own
fan fiction, within certain bounds that uneasily coexist with ecclesiastical authority. These literary
techniques are associated with women's spirituality, but they also open a space for cross-identification
and gender fluidity by readers of all genders. Within this historically situated reading community,
composing and reading such fan fiction, which is designed specifically to concentrate the reader's
intense feelings of empathy, love, and grief at different stages of Christ's passion, becomes an act of
religious devotion (Wilson 2015, 2016b).
[4.6] Fan fiction, fandom discourse, and community-authored fan fiction distribution infrastructures
offer theorizations of the pleasures and pains of using and loving texts. Some premodern literature may
resist this kind of analysis, particularly where few traces remain of the communities within which it
circulated or where little is known of the circumstances of its creation and early reception. However,
while analyses focused on readers and reading communities often situate a text in a specific time and
place, it need not be the moment of the text's creation; a reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as
fan fiction along these lines, for example, might, like Angela Florscheutz's (2019) article, focus on thetext's depiction of its own fan communities or read it as both participating in and generative of fan
fiction and fan art in the context of the pre-Raphaelite artistic and literary movement of the nineteenth
century,
[4.7] In addition, this approach can open up ways to read premodern literature whose transformative
properties are not often considered particularly interesting—because they are rote, or artistically
negligible, or tritely orthodox—but that offer a glimpse into rich cultures of affective reading. For
example, Dot Porter's (2019) reading of Books of Hours—medieval Christian prayerbooks—argues that
each unique manuscript, often designed to a patron's specifications and containing marginal annotations
by generations of readers, is its own transformative work, Books of Hours are more often treated by
scholars of the medieval world as beautifull objects than as works of literature; Porter suggests that by
reading them through the lens of fan fiction as affective reception, we might reframe the conversation
around Books of Hours using a "language of care,” combining study of the books themselves as
material objects that were read and loved, and study of the religious affect that the texts in the book
fostered and nourished through their transformation of monastic liturgy for everyday use by the laity.
Her work agrees here with Frauke Ublenbruch and Sonja Ammann (2019, § 3.11) in their editorial for
their special issue of TWC on fan fiction and ancient scribal cultures: "We should...avoid unhelpful
assumptions such as the idea that ‘authoritative’ means ‘untouchable.’ To love a text and to take it
seriously have always meant to use it."
[4.8] When we read fan fiction as literature emerging from a discourse that privileges affect, studies
of premodem fan fiction may become studies of premodem squee, premodern obsession, premodern
antifandom, or premodem "fandom killjoys." Here, study of premodern fan fiction might engage with
the robust work done on premodern audiences and celebrity, from late antique chariot racing (Cameron
1976) to the Tudor stage (Cerasano 2005), and on the history of the emotions (Reddy 2001; Rosenwein
2015). Furthermore, when we approach fan fiction as part ofa constellation of ways to love a text—as,
perhaps, a literature of desire—fan fiction more obviously takes its place among other histories of
desire, of desire's performances, modes, and identities.
5. Conclusion: The present
[5.1] _ The three axes of approach I have laid out suggest a possible theoretical model for an
interdisciplinary premodem fan fiction studies. They also offer an answer to the question with which I
began—"Is Dante's Inferno fan fiction?” —although that answer is, in typically annoying academic
fashion, also a question: "What do you mean by fan fiction?" Fan fiction is a literary genre, a form, a
legal category, an affective community, an aesthetic, an economy, and more, and each of its aspects,
demands a different approach. For this reason, attempts to create a premodem fan fiction studies by first
identifying a canon of premodern fan fiction texts are misguided; the next steps for the development of
this burgeoning and vibrant field of study must be in the development of its methodology.
[5.2] _ As the scholarship I've reviewed in this article shows, premodern fan fiction studies is well
positioned to contribute to larger conversations across disciplines about power, canonicity, marginality,
institutions, structural inequalities, and affect in the study of literature. Participation in such
conversations must include, first and foremost, reflection on how these issues are playing out in our
own research projects, and so I move finally and briefly from the domain of conceptual methodologies
to practical methodologies and the ethies of research. Across the three paradigms for research that T
have discussed, the strength and novelty of premodem fan fiction studies comes from the juxtaposition
of two historical moments, literatures, communities, and bodies of scholarship. These bodies of
scholarship also represent disciplinary socialization; premodem fan fiction scholars often have
premodern literature or history as home disciplines. These disciplines do not, generally speaking, work
with living subjects in their research. Fan fiction often serves as a space to explore sensitive and
intimate topics, and fan authors are often minors and/or vulnerable through belonging to one or more
minority groups. For interdisciplinary scholars of premodern fan fiction studies, profe
may mean influencing the adoption of fan fiction paradigms by other scholars in thei
are not themselves members of a fan community. What kinds of ethics, then, do we have a responsibility
to communicate along with these paradigms? A premodern fan fiction studies must include consultation,
of the emerging best practices around the ethies of fan studies research (Busse and Hellekson 2012;Freund and Fielding 2013; Howell 2016; Jansen 2020; Jones 2016; Kustritz 2018). In all premodem
disciplines, itis increasingly urgently clear that the study of the past must include the interrogation of
our own responsibility toward the present; the study of fan fiction is no exception to this rule.
6. Notes
1. Tam grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers of TWC for their careful readings and suggestions,
and to Kristina Busse for her stellar editorial work and leadership. This essay also benefited greatly
from comments on early drafts by Stephanie Burt, Nicholas Watson, Jessica Taylor, Anne Wilson, and
Rachael Baylis. A note about the word "premodern": While I draw on examples from several disciplines
through this article, and I believe that the methodologies I discuss are applicable to any scholarship that
brings fan fiction together with premodern literature, my home discipline is the study of medieval
English literature, which informs the examples and disciplinary conversations with which I am familiar.
Tuse the word "premodern" in its traditional chronological and geographical senses, to describe the
period of time from the beginning of extant literary production to about the mid-sixteenth century, in the
area roughly bounded at the compass points of what is now Scandinavia, the Caucasus, North Aftica,
and Ireland. These are limits imposed by my own disciplinary training, not by the reach of what might
be considered fan fiction in the literature of the past.
2. For a sample of the divergences within the fan community on this question, see the 2017 survey by
the hosts of the podcast Fansplaining, which asked fans to explore a range of possible definitions of fan
fiction falling across these three axes: https:/www.fansplaining.com/articles/toward
fanfiction
3, The 2008 "Fandom Then/Now" survey by Katherine Morrissey (2008) found that 28 percent of its
3,400 participants identified other than heterosexual, while a 2013 survey by centrumlumina of Archive
of Our Own users with 10,005 responses found that 54 percent of respondents identified themselves as
being in a gender, sexual, or romantic minority category. In the 2019 Fansplaining shipping survey, with
17,391 participants, 80 percent identified as other than heterosexual, 72 percent identified as female, 21
percent as nonbinary or genderqueer, and 9 percent as transgender. In centrumlumina’s 2013 survey, 78
percent of respondents self-identified as white, and the majority were under 30. In the Fansplaining
(2019) survey, 77 percent self-identified as white, and the largest number of respondents were bet
18 and 24.
4, "The Classical Canon and/as Transformative Work," edited by Ika Willis, special
issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 21. https:/idoi.org/10,3983/twe.2016,0807; "Fan Fiction
and Ancient Scribal Cultures," edited by Frauke Uhlenbruch and Sonja Ammann, special
issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 31. https://doi.org/10.3983/twe,2019.1887; "Fan fiction
and the Premodem World,” July 13, 2018, Oxford, UK; "Fan Cultures and the Premodern World," July
5-6, 2019, Oxford, UK.
5, Robin Hood is a recurring figure in scholarship about premodem fanfiction; see, for example,
Sheenagh Pugh's (2004, 9-10) introduction to The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary
Context,
6, "All branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of
unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the
fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is
better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in
regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them, Now these are, so to speak, their
gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence
which are everywhere scattered abroad ...these, therefore, the Christian, when he separates himself in
spirit from the miserable fellowship of these men, ought to take away from them, and to devote to their
proper use in preaching the gospel." St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (De doctrina Christiana),
Book II, ch. 40.‘L. Sayers wrote this short story for "A Tribute to Sherlock Holmes on the Occasion of his 100th
Birthday," a BBC radio programme broadcast on January 8, 1954. Script first published in Sayers on
Holmes (2001).
&, Tosenberger (2014, 14) explains her use of "recursive" thus: "As defined by David Langford in John
Clute and John Grant's The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, recursive fantasy is that which "exploits existing
fantasy settings or characters" from "a specific former fiction (805, emphasis his)."
9. The term "slash" is falling out of usage, arguably as a result of the increasing normalization of same-
sex romance in fan fiction and the AO3's choice not to use the term in their archive paratexts. However,
it is ubiquitous in fan studies scholarship and was in fandom until the mid-2010s,
10. This is a large field, but see, for example, Busse (2006); Craig (2018); Hernandez (2019); Jones
(2016); Kociemba (2010); MeInroy and Craig (2018); O'Brien (2008); Peck-Suzuki (2016); Wilson
(2016a).
11, See, for example, carrington (2016); De Kosnik (2016); Lothian (2011, 2018); Lothian, Busse, and
Reid (2007); Pande (2018); Tosenberger (2008); Willis (2006).