Fan Fiction in a Literary Context :: Fan Fiction Essays

Fan Fiction in a literary ContextFor most people, John F. Kennedy Jr was a character in a play, a character in a story, just the way operative Holmes was. When hes lost, then people react very emotionally. Constantly rehearsing the details of somebodys life-time and death shows that people are quizing to continue the story. We always try to do that when the story ends before were prepared for the ending.- Neil Postman, chairman of the department of nicety and communication at New York University1On the official Anne Rice net site2 appears the following messageI do non allow strike out illustration.The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own authoritative stories with your own characters.It is abruptly essential that you respect my wishes.Until relatively recently in the history of fiction, this would develop seemed a very odd message from writer to reader. For a start, the conceit that there is some intrinsic virtue in using an original character or story would have puzzled most antiquated or mediaeval writers. They did do that sometimes, but they plundered the vast resources of legend and history just as jubilantly - indeed there is a mediaeval convention of authorial modesty whereby writers routinely claim that they pitch the story they are about to tell in some quaint book. 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 evenhandedly 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 characters both poets had borrowed from Greek myth and do their own, though neither would have thought to call them my characters. However separate 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.