Serialized stories encourage discussion and analysis. There is plenty of evidence of Victorian “reading groups,” where friends and families would come together to read aloud the latest installments of a favorite tale, and of book exchanges, where a single pamphlet
By revising contemporary narratives of both book history and fan history, we can reread women’s work in the literary and book trades from the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries as a function of operating with and subverting patriarchal norms of
Contemporary fan fiction is overwhelmingly digital in both publication and dissemination; it has never been easier to access this subculture of writers and writing. However, fan fiction in print has likewise never been so accessible, as a slew of recent
Creativity, Fan Fiction, and Compression
The idea then is to compare the compressibility of amateur creative writing with that of experts. To accomplish this, I took 95 of the top 100 most downloaded works from Project Gutenberg. I figure that these count as very creative
[QUOTE] From Noah Berlatsky, Great News: Now Anyone Can Write and Publish a Sherlock Holmes Story
So carving off characters can be a way to comment on the original work—to expand on its themes, to examine what it erased, to update it, to teach folks about it, or just to enjoy it (and surely enjoyment is
Artistic Freedom, or This Is Not a Review of The Hobbit
This is not a review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but I’ll share some impressions for context. Though it kept me entertained, I didn’t think it was very good. The story felt padded; the implausible action scenes lacked
[QUOTE] From Michelle Dean, Why You Should Worry About Amazon Buying the Right to Publish Kurt Vonnegut Fan-Fiction
One of the weirder bits of news sailing through the Internet this week is Amazon’s acquisition, from the Vonnegut Trust, of the right to publish fan-fiction based on the, uh, Kurt Vonnegut universe. (…) Setting aside the question of whether
[QUOTE] From Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories
In Dickens’s own time, however, serialized novels were hugely controversial. Novels themselves were only beginning to find acceptance in polite society; for upper-class commentators, serialization was entirely too much. From our perspective, Dickens is a literary master, an icon of
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is currently in its third edition and encompasses over 4 million words about all things SF. It is published online in collaboration with Gollancz and the SF Gateway. This new
[QUOTE] From Anna von Veh, What Can Trade Publishers Learn from Fanfiction?
Fanfiction sits at the margins of mainstream creative endeavour, and interrogates established views of what it means to be a writer; the meaning of intellectual property, creativity, originality, ‘ownership;’ and traditional boundaries surrounding these concepts, as well as the whole