Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts

Whether you look at quantity, quality, or readership, we are in an unprecedented era of fan fiction. Thus far, however, the genre has been subject to relatively little rigorous qualitative or quantitative study—a problem that Judith May Fathallah remedies here through close analysis of fanfiction related to Sherlock, Supernatural, and Game of Thrones. Her large-scale study of the sites, receptions, and fan rejections of fanfic demonstrate how it often legitimates itself through traditional notions of authorship even as its explicit discussion and deconstruction of the author figure contests traditional discourses of authority and opens new spaces for writing that challenges the authority of media professionals.