The History of Fanfiction: An Essay

Essay

A Brief History of Fanfiction

I think it's safe to say that everyone is familiar with the concept of fiction, but not everyone is familiar with the concept of fiction that uses other people's fiction as a starting point. In the modern world, this is known as "fanfiction", because it is usually done by a fan of a particular book, movie, or television show, who writes a story of their own using those characters, places, situations or events. It's defined by Fanlore.org as: "fiction about characters or settings from an original work of fiction, created by fans of that work rather than by its creator" (Fanlore 1). Fanfiction has a long and complicated history, from Beowulf, to Star Trek fan magazines, to the internet fanfiction of today.

People's opinions of modern fanfiction vary. Lev Grossman, a novelist and Time magazine journalist, said, "Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker" (Goodreads 1). Others have a more positive take on fanfiction. Corey Olsen, Medieval Studies professor of Signum University says, "People are often very dismissive of fanfiction, and I would say, speaking as a medievalist, there is an enormously dignified pedigree for fanfiction. Some of the best works of literature in the Western canon could be classified as fanfiction. ...Fanfiction can be dreadful. But the actual intellectual and imaginative exercise of fanfiction I find respectable" (Olsen 1).

One of the most interesting-and often overlooked-things about fanfiction is its history. Many would probably trace fanfiction back to the Star Trek fans of the 1960's and 1970's, and while the Trekkies were extremely influential in fan culture, they were not the first to write and share fanfiction (Rhymes 1). The core idea of fanfiction really isn't new at all, but since the invention of legal authorship, copyright, and all of those sort of things, the way we look at such stories has changed drastically (Morrison 1). People have been retelling each others' stories-with additions or modifications of their own-for basically all of history; this was definitely the case with spoken stories, and this trend has continued with written stories (Rhymes 1). Some examples of this include a Christian scribe, who added a few lines about God to the legend of Beowulf; those lines are now in basically every interpretation (Rhymes 1). Virgil's Aeneid is explicitly a sequel to the Iliad (Fanlore 1). Many of Shakespeare's plays are based on historical people, or on existing stories, myths, and legends (Fanlore 1). For that matter, many Disney movies are based on old Grimm stories, and even Tolkien's The Hobbit could be considered a fanfiction of Beowulf (Tech 1).

Throughout the course of history, many authors didn't take very kindly to having their work used in others' stories. After finding out an unauthorized sequel had been written to his Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was very upset (Judge 1). He became a huge advocate for authors' rights in their own literary works, and was quoted as saying, "Every man who writes...cannot be divested of that property at the will and pleasure of any man" (Judge 1). At this time-the early 1700's-there were very few, if any, copyright laws (Judge 1). Even though authors during this time spoke out against the unauthorized sequels that were being written, they often resorted to writing their own sequels to usurp the "fake" ones. (Judge 1). Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe, and Richardly all reportedly wrote sequels to their stories for this reason (Judge 1).

By 1710, there was a big push for copyright laws, so England passed the Statue of Anne, which provided rights to authors so that the unofficial sequels-or any other stories stealing ideas from the original author-could be prevented (Copyright 1). Despite this, and other laws, noncommissioned sequels were still written; after Samuel Richardson's popular 1740 novel Pamela, several unauthorized sequels were published (Fanlore 1). The novel with the greatest number of noncommissioned sequels is Pride and Prejudice-published in 1813-by Jane Austen (Trickster 1). Sherlock Holmes fans began writing their own Holmes stories during the late 1800's, and later (Rhymes 1). In the 1920's, fans of Sherlock Holmes began their own societies, some of which had meetings where members would share the Holmes stories they had written (Morrison 1). Interestingly, Franklin Roosevelt-before he became U.S. President-joined and participated in one of these groups (Art 1).