Teaching & Learning Resource: A Short, Introductory Bibliography of Fanfiction Studies
This is a short bibliography intended as a resource for newcomers to the field of (Anglophone, western) fanfiction studies from a literature perspective. I compiled this for a student and find myself often asked to suggest core readings for fanfiction studies, so I am putting it up here as a resource. Updated occasionally (last updated 2025).
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
Busse, Kristina. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. University of Iowa Press, 2017.
carrington, andré m. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
De Kosnik, Abigail. “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 118–24.-------- Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT Press, 2016)
Derecho, Abigail [now De Kosnik]. “Archontic literature: a Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in ed. Hellekson and Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet.
Duggan, Jennifer. “Trans Fans and Fan Fiction: A Literature Review.” Transformative Works and Cultures 39, 2023.
Edwards, Alexandra. Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom, Louisiana State University Press, 2023.
Fathallah, Judith. Fanfiction and the Author. Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
———. The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. 1st ed. Iowa City, Iowa: University Of Iowa Press, 2014.
Jamison, Anne Elizabeth. Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking over the World. Dallas, Texas: Smart Pop, an imprint of BenBella Books, Inc, 2013.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Kelley, Brit, Loving Fanfiction: Exploring the Role of Emotion in Online Fandoms, Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture 49 (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2021).
Lothian, Alexis, “archive of one’s own: Subcultural creativity and the politics of conservation,” Transformative Works and Cultures 21 (March 15, 2011), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0267;
Lothian Alexis and Stanfill, Mel, “An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure,” Transformative Works and Cultures 36 (September 15, 2021), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2119;
Pande, Rukmini, Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018.
Russ, Joanna, “Pornography by Women for Women, with Love,” in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts. Crossing Press, 1985.
Tosenberger, Catherine, “Mature Poets Steal: Children’s Literature and the Unpublishability of Fanfiction,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2014): 4–27
Wanzo, Rebecca, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 20. 2015.
Important Journals:
Transformative Works and Cultures (open-access)
The Journal of Fandom Studies
General Introductions to Fan Studies
Booth, Paul. A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. Wiley Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies 18. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018.
Booth, Paul, and Rebecca Williams. A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics. Fandom & Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021.
Gray Jonathan, Sandvoss Cornel, and Harrington C. Lee, Fandom, Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 2nd Edition (NYU Press, 2017).
Relevant Key Readings in Cultural Studies and Reader-Response Theory
Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author.”
De Certeau, Michel, “Reading as Poaching,” from The Practice of Everyday Life.
Huyssen, Andreas, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other”, in Studies in entertainment: critical approaches to mass culture, edited by Tania Modleski.
Hall, Stuart, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media” (collected in Writings on Media, Duke University Press, 2021) and “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular” (in Essential Essays Vol. 1, Duke University Press, 2019)
Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.