The role of affect in fan fiction

Authors

  • Anna Wilson University of Toronto

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2016.0684

Keywords:

Classical literature, Classical reception, Emotion, Gender, Hermeneutics, Medieval literature

Abstract

In this article, I argue for greater consideration of the role of affect in fan fiction when comparing it with literary forms from antiquity. Fan fiction uses an affective hermeneutics—knowing through feeling—and as a literary form it is inextricable from the fannish discourses that produce it. Yuletide letters—story requests in the annual fan fiction gift exchange for historical RPF—show how fan fiction readers and writers frame knowledge of history in terms of affect in order to fill the gaps in the past.

Author Biography

Anna Wilson, University of Toronto

Anna Wilson has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her dissertation is entitled "Immature Pleasures: Affective Reading in Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Modern Fan Communities" (2015).

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Published

2016-03-15

Issue

Vol. 21 (2016)

Section

Theory

License

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