Harry Potter and Fanfiction: Filling in the Gaps

I examine one fanfiction story, The Way Back to Daylight by Kettle, and the way this story asks us to reinterpret the Harry Potter series using The Aeneid as an allusive intertext. Fanfiction is as any narrative that relies upon the essential elements of one author’s storyworld for the construction and intelligibility of a new storyworld. As readers, we are prompted to imagine the storyworld through cues in the text, in greater or lesser detail depending on the information provided. There are always gaps in the discourse—spaces that are not and cannot be fully determined by information in the text. These gaps offer a tantalizing opportunity for fanfiction to come in and re-negotiate the narrative, creating alternatives or extrapolations beyond the fiction as it is presented originally. By attempting to augment the narrative from which it derives through fictional gaps, skillful fanfiction asks the reader to re-read that source narrative—continuing the story beyond the last page. The interpretational issues I explore in The Way Back to Daylight are the fanfiction’s romantic reading of Remus and Sirius’ relationship, and its further re-negotiation of the laws surrounding death in the Harry Potter world using Aenus’ journey to the underworld in The Aeneid as a reference. Ultimately, The Way Back to Daylight presents a fantasy of resurrection that is impossible in Rowling’s world, allowing readers to write a happy ending for Remus and Sirius that never existed in the Harry Potter series. Even when the fanfiction’s interpretation is impossible in the original story, fanfiction is capable of changing its readers’ subsequent experiences of that original story. Studying fanfiction can help us understand the processes of intertextuality and transtextuality that underlie all fictional endeavors.No embarg

Reality beckons: metamodernist depthiness beyond panfictionality

It is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We conceive of this new logic as metamodernism. Whilst some twenty-first century texts still engage with and utilise postmodernist practices, they put these practices to new use. In this article, we investigate the metamodern usage of the typically postmodernist devices of metatextuality and ontological slippage in two genres: autofiction and true crime documentary. Specifically, we analyse Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and the Netflix mini-series The Keepers, demonstrating that forms of fictionalisation, metafictionality and ontological blurring between fiction and reality have been repurposed. We argue that, rather than expand the scope of fiction, overriding reality, the metamodernist repurposing of postmodernist textual strategies generates a kind of ‘reality-effect’

Victorian penny press plagiarisms as transmedia storytelling

The Victorian period saw the proliferation of penny press plagiarisms—that is, transformations of middle-class narratives, typically for a lower-class audience. Authors of these often anonymous transformations performed labor by expanding existing narratives in ways that resonate with today's understanding of fan fiction and transmedia storyworlds. Penny press plagiarisms illustrate the methodological challenges of studying the historical reception of literary and popular culture events that might be characterized as fannish, as the constitutive elements that describe a fan must be traced backward in the absence of living communities and with ephemeral evidence of engagement with popular culture texts. Application of insights from media and periodical studies shows that the penny press contributes to the long history of fandom. The Victorian period's literary markets, social class politics, and copyright paradigms defamiliarize these concepts in the field of studies of fans and fandoms, revealing how a history of Victorian fandom is also a history of for-profit transmedia storytelling