"Victorian Penny Press Plagiarisms as Fanfiction?"

Abstract:

The Victorian period saw a proliferation of penny press “plagiarisms”— transformations of middle-class narratives, typically for a lower-class audience. While the authors who penned these transformations were often anonymous and, at the time, known by critics of the practice as hacks, their labor nonetheless expanded pre-existing narratives in ways that resemble fanfiction and transmedia storyworlds today. The designation of these works as plagiarism (a term that Victorians critical of the penny press then used) misrepresents the legality of the penny press enterprise: these transformations were not violations of copyright at the time. Penny press transformations were undertaken with an explicit profit motive instead of the sharing culture that now dominates fan works. At the same time, penny press narratives asked audiences to accept “further adventures” of characters who are represented by another artist’s hand. In this way, the penny press is evidence for fundamental aspects of receptive practices that undergird nearly all transfictional fan practices, while also exhibiting key similarities to transmedia franchises. In this paper, I will discuss the methodological challenges of studying historical reception of literary and popular culture events that may arguably be characterized as “fannish.” When we treat the penny press “hacks” and their audiences as predecessors to fandom, what are the constitutive elements of the “fan” that we draw backward? In the absence of living communities, how do we trace the responses of audiences whose engagement with texts and popular culture phenomena were ephemeral? I turn to media and periodical studies to show how the penny press figures in the long history of fandom. The Victorian period’s literary markets, social class politics, and copyright paradigms defamiliarize those same concepts for current fan studies, and reveal how a Victorian history of fandom is also a history of for-profit transmedia storytelling.

This article is forthcoming at Transformative Works and Cultures, September 2021

“Victorian Penny Press Plagiarisms as Fanfiction?” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 36, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2049, forthcoming September 2021.