Abstract
This chapter traverses the discursive space mapped and staked out by the dedicated Austen fan site, the Republic of Pemberley, and its offshoot, the Derbyshire Writers’ Guild. It pays attention to the ways in which these online spaces evoke material and ‘real world’ places, generating a sense of civic municipality as well as literary community. Drawing on the insights of Library and Computer Studies, this chapter takes up the linguistic clues set up in the nomenclature used at these sites and reads their fan fiction collections in relation to the practices and traditions of the bricks-and-mortar library and its physical archive. It goes on to offer close readings of a number of Persuasion-based stories from the Bits of Ivory archive at the Republic of Pemberley and the Fantasia Gallery at the Derbyshire Writers’ Guild.
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Notes
John Whitington, PDF Explained, Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, 2011, 1.
Deborah Yaffe, Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom, Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2013, 23.
Abigail Derecho, ‘Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction’, in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2006, 61.
See David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, NY: Henry Holt and Co, Times Books, 2007, 7
Timothy W. Luke, ‘The Politics and Philosophy of E-Text: Use Value, Sign Value, and Exchange Value in the Transition From Print to Digital Media’, in Cushla Kapitzke and Bertram C. Bruce (eds), Libr@ries: Changing Information Space and Practice, Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006
See Richard Maker, ‘Finding What You’re Looking for: A Reader-Centred Approach to the Classification of Adult Fiction in Public Libraries’, The Australian Library Journal, May 2008, 169–77, Bob Hassett, Another Opinion’, 47, and Barbara Fister, ‘The Dewey Dilemma’, Library Journal 134:16, October 2009, 22.
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, London: HarperCollins, 1996, 198.
Suzanne R. Pucci, ‘The Return Home’, in Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson (eds), Jane Austen and Co: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, Albany: State University of New York Press, c. 2003, 134.
Mary Ann O’Farrell, ‘Austenian Subcultures’, in Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (eds), A Companion to Jane Austen, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 483.
Paraphrased in Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon, ‘Introduction: Republics of Letters and Literary Communities’, in Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon (eds), Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012, v.
Clifford Siskin, ‘Do Novels Think Electric Thoughts?’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43:1, 2010, 121.
Jane Austen, Persuasion, London: Penguin, 1985, 55.
Roberta Brandi, ‘Web Side Stories: Janeites, Fanfictions, and Never Ending Romances’, in Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Anton Kirchhofer and Sirpa Leppänen (eds), Internet Fictions, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 27–32.
Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, London: Secker & Warburg, 1985, 67.
John Mullen, What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved, London: Bloomsbury, 2012, 291.
See Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner, ‘Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation’, in Oliver Lindner and Pascal Nicklas (eds), Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film and the Arts, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012, 2.
Deborah Yaffe, Among the Janeites, 193; Elise Barker, ‘“Jane Austen is My Homegirl”: American Janeites and the Ironic Postmodern Identity’, in Laurence Raw and Robert G. Dryden (eds), Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion, and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 196.
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© 2014 Kylie Mirmohamadi
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Mirmohamadi, K. (2014). ‘Thanks for Fanning’: Online Austen Fan Fiction. In: The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401335_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401335_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48636-6
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