Shakespeare’s Fans: Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom

Description

This book examines Shakespearean adaptations through the critical lens of fan studies and asks what it means to be a fan of Shakespeare in the context of contemporary media fandom. Although Shakespeare studies and fan studies have remained largely separate from one another for the past thirty years, this book establishes a sustained dialogue between the two fields. In the process, it reveals and seeks to overcome the problematic assumptions about the history of fan cultures, Shakespeare’s place in that history, and how fan works are defined. While fandom is normally perceived as a recent phenomenon focused primarily on science fiction and fantasy, this book traces fans’ practices back to the eighteenth century, particularly David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Shakespeare’s Fans connects historical and scholarly debates over who owns Shakespeare and what constitutes an appropriate adaptation of his work to online fan fiction and commercially available fan works. Front Matter ....Pages i-vii Introduction: To Squee or not to Squee? (Johnathan H. Pope)....Pages 1-32 “My love admits no qualifying dross”: Affect and the Shakespeare Fan from 10 Things I Hate About You to Garrick’s Jubilee (Johnathan H. Pope)....Pages 33-66 “my worthless gifts”?: Shakespeare, Legitimacy, and the Gift Economy (Johnathan H. Pope)....Pages 67-98 “the rest is …”: Shakespeare and Online Fan Fiction (Johnathan H. Pope)....Pages 99-132 “There is no slander in an allowed fool”: Shakespeare, RPF, and Parody (Johnathan H. Pope)....Pages 133-168 Conclusion (Johnathan H. Pope)....Pages 169-175 Back Matter ....Pages 177-184