The super politics of comic book fandom
Editorial for "Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books," edited by Matthew Costello, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 13 (2013).
The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context
Fandoms as diverse as Jane Austen, Blake's 7, and The Bill are explored in this guide to the cultural phenomenon of fan fiction. Examining how anonymous authors bring their own gloss and invention to their favorite novels, films, and TV series; develop characters; expand narratives; and, in the slash genre, explore homosexual relationships between otherwise heterosexual characters, this analysis covers fanfic terminology, its mechanisms for participation and support, the differences between fan fiction and conventional publishing, and the genre's literary merits.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.