The role of affect in fan fiction

  • 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).
Published
2016-03-15
Issue
Vol 21 (2016)
Section
Theory
Copyright (c) 2016 Transformative Works and Cultures

TWC Nos. 25 onward are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For an explanation of the journal's reasoning, see  the editorial, Copyright and Open Access. 

TWC Nos. 1 through 24 are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License with TWC, not the author, retaining copyright. For more information, see the Copyright Section.