Anne Jamison

I wish I had known about this book when I was writing a paper on this (and related) topic. It has some strong grounding in writers like Jenkins, while expanding the research in the face of new trends. My only criticism would be that because it covers a lot of areas, many of them very fascinating, its depth is necessarily a little more more shallow than I would have liked. Still, I suppose if you were new to fanfic as both an entity and a potential research topic, this book would be an excellent starting point.… (mehr)

I've been doing a bit of reading in the area of fan studies lately, so as someone involved in fandom and fanfiction communities, this was certainly a book I needed to pick up. I was really interested to see an approach focused on fanfiction from an academic perspective. And for the first third of the book, I feel like that's what I got. But past that, the in-depth and objective feeling seemed to fade. A number of major controversies in fanfiction are highlighted, often without a full perspective, and the weighting of examples is heavy in two specific fandoms (which, with fanfiction being a very large panfandom activity, it would have been good to bring in a wider array of examples or case studies, I think).

Overall, the book does provide a good overview of fanfiction for someone who may not know much about its history, but I'd be hard-pressed to call this 'the definitive text' on the subject.… (mehr)

As a fairly voracious consumer of fic in multiple fandoms, I'd seen a number of posts about this book, and was intrigued by the concept of a dedicated volume about the concept of fanfic. Although the subtitle is a bit overambitious, the amount of research and analysis collected here makes a good attempt at explaining the appeal and pervasiveness of fanfiction. This is more of a 3.5 star rating for me -- I agree with other reviewers who said that the first half of the book is more coherent than the second half (it may also have to do with my familiarity with some fandoms and lack thereof for others).… (mehr)