Fic ─ Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

Everyone's talking about fanfiction these days, thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey. But for a very, very long time, they weren't. Even people who wrote it didn't talk about it. Fanfiction may have been an ?open secret,” but it was a closed closet. Fic opens that closet door and puts its contents on display: its most darling outfits, its awkward years, and those horrors from the '80s that no retro-chic is ever bringing back.

From remixes and crossovers to alternate-point-of-view, alternate-ending retellings, Fic looks at the history and culture of fan writing, and presents provocative discussions on fanfiction from both fan and ?professional” writers. It looks at the way fanfiction not only redraws the boundaries of stories and characters, but also transforms how we think about and experience authorship, reading, writing, and more.

Anne Jamison is associate professor of English at the University of Utah, where she teaches and writes about literature and culture from the 18th century to the present. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton and is the author of Poetics en passant (Palgrave, 2009), the forthcoming Kafka's Other Prague, and a variety of essays and articles?as well as a blog about teaching fanfiction, and a lot of tweets. Her work on fanfiction has been quoted in publications from The New York Review of Books to The Wall Street Journal to Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch. She lives happily in Salt Lake City in a house full of children, basset hounds, and an avant-garde poet. And yes, of course she’s written fic.