![]() ![]() Fans have moved from the margins to the mainstream within convergence culture, and echoing this shift we’ve seen a proliferation of fan and geek characters within popular culture. Like many first wave fan studies, Textual Poachers spoke back to dominant representations of fans as “brainless consumers” (10). Here's a small excerpt from that exchange: The finish image, she tells us, involved 200 layers and 242MB of data.įor the reissue of the book, Suzanne Scott, a rising young fan scholar, did an extensive interview with me, in which she posed challenging questions about what has happened to fandom and fan studies over the past twenty years. So, let me throw out my own fan challenge: I will happily send along one autographed copy of the new edition of Textual Poachers to any fan author who wants to write the story to accompany this picture (especially if you will let us publish the story through my blog.) Send it to me at book also includes a detailed artist's statement in which GLM explains the process of photographic manipulation through which she generated the core image. It has occurred to me that there is probably more than one fan story to be written to explain the configuration of characters and settings presented here. The selection of these figures was a challenge: we needed characters that were likely to be recognized by non-fan readers but which also had a rich role in the history of fan culture, and the press was a little nervous about certain rights holders who had a reputation for being a bit litigious in going after infringers (so no Disney, no Harry Potter.). These characters are meant to stand in for the hundreds of fictional figures who have inspired fan devotion and creativity since Textual Poachers first appeared. Keep in mind that Jean Kluge's original was an alternative universe version of Star Trek: The Next Generation read through the lens of Arthurian romance. We chose four characters - Spock, Darth Vader, Buffy and Xena - who represented four key fantoms that span the past two decades, and we positioned them in an alternative reality fantasy that allowed us the chance to imagine interactions between them. As with the original, we wanted to suggest the play with alternative universes, which is a staple of fan fiction. While the original cover was based on a pre-existing fan work, this new cover was commissioned from and developed in conceptual collaboration with the artist. This cover embodies the new aesthetic of photo-manipulation, which remains controversial among some fans but which has also represented a clear demonstration of the way that fans turn borrowed materials into resource for their own collective expression. My hopes for the new cover were that it should represent, as the original did, the work of a fan artist and it should employ an aesthetic that grows out of the fan community's own modes of cultural production that it should represent a transformative use of existing source material and that it should suggest the dynamic nature of fandom, which has absorbed new content and embraced new forms of production since the original book was published. Here's part of the explanation for the cover design I wrote for the book: ![]() To be honest, it was very hard for me to let go of the original cover, which was constructed around a wonderful piece of Star Trek fan art by Jean Kluge, which my wife, Cynthia, had bought for me as a gift at MediaWest and which had been close at hand throughout the process of drafting the book.īut, in the end, we were able to produce a cover I am really very proud of - in collaboration with a contemporary fan artist who has chosen to go here by the name of GLM: ![]() One of the challenges of producing this edition was the struggle to come up with the right approach to the cover design. (well, never mind that part!) When I wrote this book as a first year assistant professor, I would never have anticipated the impact it would have and I certainly would not have imagined that Routledge would be willing to reissue it to mark the twentieth anniversary of its publication. This book, my first, is now twenty years old (meaning that it is old enough to drink and vote) and that means that I am old enough to. This past week, I received in the mail my author's copy of my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |