The Case for Fanfiction: Exploring the Pleasures and Practices of a Maligned Craft

 Challenging readers to rethink what they read and why, the author questions the aesthetic assumptions that have led to the devaluing of fanfiction—a genre criticized as both tasteless and derivative—and other “guilty pleasure” reading (and writing), including romance and fantasy. The complicated relationship between “fanfic” and intellectual property rights is discussed in light of the millennia-old tradition of derivative literature, before modern copyright law established originality as the hallmark of great fiction. “Absorbed reading”—the practice of immersing oneself in the narrative versus critically “reading from a distance”—is a strong motive for the appropriation by fanfiction of canon characters and worlds.