Fanfiction and the Author

by Judith M. Fathallah

The production, reception and discussion of fanfiction is a major aspect of contemporary global media. Thus far, however, the genre has been subject to relatively little rigorous qualitative or quantitative study-a problem that Judith M. Fathallah remedies here through close analysis of fanfiction related to Sherlock, Supernatural, and Game of Thrones. Her large-scale study of the sites, reception, and fan rejections of fanfic demonstrate how the genre works to legitimate itself through traditional notions of authorship, even as it deconstructs the author figure and contests traditional discourses of authority. Through a process she identifies as the 'legitimation paradox', Fathallah demonstrates how fanfic hooks into and modifies the discourse of authority, and so opens new spaces for writing that challenges the authority of media professionals.

Genres: Nonfiction

234 pages, Hardcover

Published January 8, 2017

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an accessibly written scholarly monograph and an accessibly available one at that (yay open access). I really want a second edition to be honest. This was published in 2017 and so written and published before the three shows under examination (Sherlock, Game of Thrones, and Supernatural) dramatically shat the bed. There's an underlying tension in some of the fanworks cited with the canon, author-ed texts and I'd be really interested to see Fathallah revisit this research now that the shows are over.

Edit: A few days later and after meeting with the Fan Studies reading group I read this for, I have a few additional thoughts. I have some methodological questions that have bubbled up over the last few days. Fathallah doesn't really discuss how she coded the comments on the various fics she reviewed for this research, and I would have liked to hear more about her sentiment analysis methods. I think she also hamstrings herself in a few ways by focusing on the comments as a metric for her discourse analysis. So many people read and appreciate fanfic without commenting, and using comments as the foundation for this analysis seems to exclude other avenues for discussing the impact of various fic trends on fandom discourse. She also focuses significantly on fanfiction.net and LiveJournal, and, while AO3 is mentioned, this strategy seems to narrow her corpus in a strange way. I still think this is a valuable read and the methodology chapter is something I'd recommend as an accessible intro to discourse analysis, but I've revised my review down to three stars.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

lol, it was fine but not what i needed