Fan Fiction in a Literary Context :: Fan Fiction Essays

Fan Fiction in a Literary ContextFor most people, John F. Kennedy Jr was a computer address in a play, a character in a story, just the way Sherlock Holmes was. When hes lost, then people react very emotionally. Constantly rehearsing the details of somebodys life and death shows that people argon trying to continue the story. We always try to do that when the story ends before were prepargond for the ending.- Neil Postman, chairman of the de assortment of culture and communication at New York University1On the official Anne Rice web site2 appears the following messageI do not allow fan fiction.The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think near fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own headmaster stories with your own characters.It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.Until relatively recently in the accounting of fiction, this would have seemed a very odd message from writer to reader. For a start, the idea that the re is some intrinsic virtue in using an original character or story would have puzzled most ancient or mediaeval writers. They did do that sometimes, but they plundered the vast resources of myth and business relationship just as happily - indeed there is a mediaeval convention of authorial modesty whereby writers routinely claim that they found the story they are about to tell in some ancient bind. Thus Robert Henryson, the fifteenth-century Scottish poet, tells how, one winter night by the fire, he read a book writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious,Of fair Cresseid and lustie Troilus.3 And he tells us that when he had finished Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde, which ends with Troilus mourning his faithless love but does not say what became of her, he took another book, in which he found...the fatall destinieOf fair Cresseid This second book, of course, does not exist, though it will he is about to write it. The Testament of Cresseid is his sequel to Chaucers poem, using the charact ers both poets had borrowed from Greek myth and made their own, though neither would have thought to call them my characters. However individualised by each successive poet who used them, they were still Troilus and Cressida, part of a resource that belonged to all.History is another such resource and Shakespeare, his contemporaries and successors happily plundered classical, English and European history for plots and characters.