While researching Before Fanfiction, I gathered hundreds of research images that helped trace the spread of fandom and fan practices from women’s clubs, to magazines, to fan mail. Not all of the images made it into the book, but they are fascinating documents and potential research rabbit holes.
Women’s Clubs
Though many fan studies histories credit science fiction fandom with organizing early fan clubs and holding the first fan conventions, this chapter points out that the club and convention format long predated the science fiction clubs of the 1930s. It traces the lineage of women’s social reform and literary clubs, reading them as proto-fan communities. The women’s club movement, which spread across the United States in the nineteenth century, shared literary practices like communal reading, writing essays, giving oral performances, and creating printed texts like programs, yearbooks, and newspapers. Like later fan communities, clubwomen practiced critiquing and transforming shared media texts in intimate social settings.
—Before Fanfiction, chapter 1
Fandom in the Magazines
Resisting the myth that fandom originated in the letter columns of science fiction pulps, this chapter sketches the spread of “fan” and “fandom” as terms used to define sports, film, and book lovers in all kinds of early twentieth-century periodicals. This chapter pairs analysis of Amazing Stories’ interactive science fiction “Shaver Mystery” with the almost century-long tradition of adaptation and transformation that novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos kicked off in 1925 with the debut of her modernist transmedia icon Lorelei Lee in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. Both, I argue, can be understood as precursors to contemporary fanfiction, and both were made possible by creative engagement with the form and the community of the early twentieth- century periodical press.
—Before Fanfiction, chapter 2
Literary Fan Mail
[This] chapter moves from letters reprinted in magazines to primary documents, examining early twentieth-century fan mail as a form that likewise foreshadowed fanfiction.
—Before Fanfiction, chapter 3
