Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom

Previous studies of fanfiction in the United States have centered male-dominated science fiction as the origins of the genre, focusing on the primacy of the 1960s Star Trek television series and tracing the fandom’s roots back to pulp science fiction magazines of the 1930s. In Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom, Alexandra Edwards challenges this origin myth. Through an impressive array of archival documentation and innovative theoretical approaches, Edwards encourages readers to consider how women writers in the United States, in particular those associated with regionalism, participated in literary fan cultures. Ultimately, Before Fanfiction makes valuable contributions to the areas of reception studies, fan studies, and periodical studies.As a means of introduction, Edwards discusses her own participation in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan communities; this approach makes the unique vocabulary fan communities use more accessible to new readers. Noting that fan communities and academics often share interpretive aims without drawing on each other, Edwards provides a comprehensive overview of relevant cultural studies research, drawing on classic works of literary theory by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, as well as more contemporary scholarship in popular culture and print studies by Henry Jenkins, Ellen Gruber Garvey, and Mike Chasar. Throughout the introduction, Edwards also establishes the gendered and queer theory frameworks that underpin her interpretations of fan community practices and literature.Before Fanfiction is divided into three primary chapters, followed by both a postlude and conclusion. The three chapters are each organized around distinct fan practices related to community-building and document exchanges. In chapter 1, Edwards posits women’s literary clubs served as “proto” fan communities. The chapter opens with a comprehensive yet concise overview of the women’s club movement in the United States, with a particular focus on how members engaged with works of literature. Edwards then provides two case studies of women’s clubs: the Wednesday Club of Geneva, Indiana, organized in 1889 by regional writer Gene Stratton-Porter (known for her novel A Girl of the Limberlost), and the Chicago Poet’s Class, which African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks attended in 1941 at the Southside Community Arts Center. Examining Stratton-Porter’s lone surviving Wednesday Club contribution—an analysis of the poetry of Walt Whitman—Edwards examines its impact on her representations of gender and sexuality in her novels Freckles and The Harvester. Of the Chicago Poet’s Class, meanwhile, Edwards highlights the opportunities it gave Brooks and fellow participants to engage with and reshape texts, in Brooks’s case her Illiad-inspired poem, Annie Allen. Through detailed analysis of archival documents and close readings of Stratton-Porter and Brooks’s literary texts, Edwards suggests that these clubs provided both women opportunities “to practice transformative writing in a private community of like-minded friends,” exercising textual engagement similar to fan communities today (47).In chapter 2, Edwards considers fan letter columns in magazines as evidence of a growing cultural presence of fandom. One of the highlights of this chapter is the way in which Edwards documents evidence of fan interactivity via periodicals—and the way that periodicals attempted to capitalize on fan engagement. In her analysis of the Saturday Review of Literature (first issued in 1924) she considers the “Phoenix Nest,” a column edited by William Rose Benét, which ran from 1924 until his death in 1950, as a site of literary fan exchange. “Benét wrote as equal parts literary insider and enthusiastic fan,” Edwards argues, “filling the ‘Phoenix Nest’ with loving literary parody and pastiche, news gossip, opinions, and reader contributions” (65). Having taken Benét’s column to represent his fannish engagement with existing literary texts, Edwards turns to the figure of Lorelei from Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (first published as a sketch in Harper’s Bazaar in 1925) as a “modernist transmedia icon” who inspired fans to recreate multiple Loreleis across multiple mediums, including a musical and film.These fan exchanges via periodicals prepare readers for Edwards’s analysis of another important fan practice: fan mail. Chapter 3 opens with a valuable and original analysis of the tropes in fan letters to authors, including (but not limited to) apologies for intruding on their time; expressions of deep familiarity and affection for the author’s work; identification with the author’s texts and/or the author; and descriptions of their own creative endeavors. These tropes can provide scholars with a path to deeper, more nuanced studies of fan letters. In the second half of the chapter, Edwards provides a case study of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who achieved literary celebrity due to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling, published in 1938. This consideration of Rawlings continues in a brief postlude, “Fan History and Contemporary Fan Tourism,” which argues that the gift economy of fan practices takes on a physical presence through literary tourism, using the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park as an example.Edwards takes a bit of a risk in her conclusion, which examines the claims that Nella Larsen committed an act of plagiarism in publishing her final short story, “Sanctuary.” Given the scope of Edwards’s volume, this introduction of new material loses the opportunity to consider the deeper implications for fan studies presented in the chapters. Allowing readers a more contemplative moment could have been useful here. Nevertheless, it is clear why Edwards chose to incorporate a discussion of Larsen as a means of conclusion. Her analysis of “Sanctuary” fits well with Edwards’s goals, as she speculates that the practice of “race-bending” (the fan practice of re-writing fan texts with diverse characters) might allow readers to see “Sanctuary” not as an act of plagiarism, but rather, as “an earnest exploration of how a narrative changes when its characters are Black Americans instead of poor white British” (139). Although slim, this section suggests that the framework of race-bending fan cultures may be used to understand African-American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.I admit that I came to Edwards’ monograph as a fan of her previous work on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a web series adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In Before Fanfiction, Edwards offers a valuable avenue for scholars to envision how the frameworks of fan cultures can applied to literary history. Her volume provides a valuable model in examining the networks of media exchange and literary influence in the United States.