Research and writings
Joe Orton
Coppa is known for her work on Joe Orton, [6] a British playwright and novelist who came to prominence in 1963 and whose career was cut short by his murder by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in 1967. [6] [7] She started to research Orton formally in 1994, based on an archive of materials at Boston University, [6] [lower-alpha 1] as well as papers that she found Orton's sister had been keeping at home in a cardboard box. [9] Coppa says that Orton's writings have "challenged and delighted me", citing "the perfection of his word choice, his almost-tangible glee at his own inventiveness, the dead-on rightness of his social anger, his confident assertion of sexual desire." She highlights the rapid pace of social change during his brief career, and states that the "many contradictions" of a man who was "young, working-class, intellectual, homosexual, and 'macho' all at the same time" render Orton "an almost irresistible symbol." [8]
Many of Orton's early works had never been published, and Coppa edited two of his plays – Fred and Madge (written in 1959) and The Visitors (1961) – for first publication in 1998. [7] [8] [10] In the same year, she edited for first publication his earliest solo novel, Between Us Girls, a parody in diary format written in 1957, and contributed a thirty-page introduction covering his life and career, described by Elaine Showalter as "excellent" and William Hutchings as "useful". [8] [10] [11] Coppa recognizes the bisexual male character Bob Kennedy, who rescues and marries the novel's protagonist Susan, not only as a forerunner to later characters, but also as a model for Orton to reinvent himself as "the successful playwright as swaggering hooligan, ex-convict, working-class tough in a leather jacket". [10] She also edited and introduced Lord Cucumber and The Boy Hairdresser, two of five short novels he wrote in collaboration with Halliwell, on their first publication in 1999. [8] [10] [12]
She edited Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003), a collection of twelve essays, split into those that address Orton's works as literature and those that attempt to place them in the context of his life. The first section contains essays examining the plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane , The Good and Faithful Servant and The Erpingham Camp , as well as comparisons with Oscar Wilde, Caryl Churchill and even Jane Austen. The second section includes essays focusing on Orton's sexuality, his diaries, and the context in which he wrote, [13] and includes a contribution by Orton and Halliwell's biographer, Simon Shepherd. [6] [13] Coppa wrote the final essay on a 1995 conversation between the actor John Alderton and Orton's sister, who represents his estate. [13] Tom Smith, in a review for Theatre Journal , describes the collection as an "excellent scholarly resource" with "diverse and interesting" content, but considers that Coppa has not gone far enough towards broadening Orton scholarship, which has focused on a limited selection of his works. [13]
Other literature, theatre studies
Orton has frequently been likened to Wilde, [7] [13] and Coppa has also published on the latter. In 2010, she surveyed representations of Wilde in twentieth-century plays, including Micheál Mac Liammóir's one-man show, The Importance of Being Oscar , drawing attention to a prevalent "revisionist view" of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and concluding that the works are more informative about their own times than that of Wilde. The reviewer Timothy Peltason agrees with her conclusions but points out that Coppa also considers the works from a "somewhat limiting" current perspective, holding the works to "un-Wildean standards of accuracy and fairness in representation". [14] Her other publications on Wilde include an introduction to The Importance of Being Earnest (2015), [15] a "clearly written" chapter on performance theory, [16] and an "insightful" article on teaching Lady Windermere's Fan , in which she states that in her experience, Wilde needs to be taught as "melodramatist, modernist, and postmodernist all at once". [17] [18] She has also published on the early plays of Harold Pinter [19] and queer sexuality in Brideshead Revisited . [20]
Coppa co-edited Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2008), with Lawrence Hass and James Peck, a collection that includes both practical magicians and researchers on stage magic. [21] She contributed an essay about the low status accorded to the female assistant compared with the male conjuror. [22]
Fan studies
In 2007, with Naomi Novik, Rebecca Tushnet and others, Coppa was a founder of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit body that aims "to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures"; [23] she served on the board until 2012, and remains an emeritus director. [24] [25] The fandom expert Henry Jenkins highlights her work on challenging intellectual property rights as applied to fanworks. [26] She is particularly known for her work documenting the history of the fanvid – which she defines as "a visual essay" that intends "to make an argument or tell a story" [27] and uses the accompanying music track as "an interpretive lens to help the viewer to see the source text differently" [28] – and has published on vidding as a women's practice, distinct from other forms of fan-created videos. [26] [27] [28] In 2012, she co-edited a special issue of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures entitled "Fan/Remix Video", with Julie Levin Russo. [29] Her highest-cited research paper is on the history of American media fandom, [lower-alpha 2] which seeks to differentiate it from general science fiction fandom, [30] and has been criticized for not covering non-western fandoms. [31] In a 2006 paper, Coppa analyzed fan fiction using performance theory, positing that fan fiction writers respond to "dramatic, not literary, modes of storytelling" and so should be assessed by "performative rather than literary criteria"; she developed the theory to address common criticisms of fan fiction, including its focus on the physical, its repetitious and relatively ephemeral nature, and its requirement for an audience. [30] [32] [33] [34] In 2014, she wrote a response to Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington's 2007 dismissive description of first-wave fan studies as the "Fandom Is Beautiful" era, entitled "Fuck Yeah, Fandom Is Beautiful". [35]
Coppa edited a collection of fan fiction, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, published by University of Michigan Press in 2017 and intended as a college-level teaching text. [36] [37] Describing her motivations for creating the collection, Coppa states: "I want people to see that fanfiction is legal – a transformative fair use that can be published and sold in certain contexts – and also that it's an art." [38] Jenkins describes The Fanfiction Reader as "the first anthology of fan fiction for use in the classroom", and praises Coppa and University of Michigan Press for their "courage" in tackling what he refers to as "taboos" relating to publishing fan fiction. [26] Stephanie Burt points out that the many previous academic works on fan fiction did not include extended examples and "a printed collection of the stuff, from a university press, with no serial numbers removed" would probably not have been possible as recently as 2012 because of the threat of legal action, attributing the change at least in part to the advocacy of OTW. [36]
The Fanfiction Reader assembles short, non-adult-rated stories covering a range of fan fiction genres, based in widely known American or British sources, [26] [36] [37] which Burt describes as Coppa's idea of "good on-ramps to the phenomenon". [36] Coppa organizes the anthology as a "modern Canterbury Tales ", with the chapter titles referencing this work. [37] The authors include Astolat, KaydeeFalls, Rheanna, Speranza and Yahtzee, [36] [39] and the stories range in date between 1998 and 2017. [37] Coppa provides a general overview of fan fiction, including five different definitions, [40] together with brief introductions to each fandom, which include Buffy , Doctor Who , Harry Potter , James Bond , Star Trek and Supernatural , as well as real-person fiction, which treats real celebrities as if they were fictional characters. [36] [37] She also locates the stories within their context, emphasizing the communal and collaborative nature of fannish writing, and includes multiple "meta" stories, which comment on fan writing itself. [26] [37] Burt, in a review for The New Yorker , describes most of the stories in the collection as "thoughtful, and delightful", [36] but notes that fan fiction encountered in such a book is divorced from the actual experience of finding and reading fan fiction. [36] Lorraine M. Dubuisson, in a review for Transformative Works and Cultures, recommends the collection for teaching purposes, but highlights the relatively limited focus, which excludes non-western sources and sexually explicit works. [37] Burt describes The Fanfiction Reader as accessible and a "good first encounter with the genus", [36] and Dubuisson generally agrees but questions whether Coppa's background information will prove adequate to allow readers to understand stories based in multiple-season television series. [37] The book won the Media and Cultural Studies category of the Association of American Publishers's Prose Awards in 2018. [41]
A fandom is a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of empathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices, differentiating fandom-affiliated people from those with only a casual interest.
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex. While the term "slash" originally referred only to stories in which male characters are involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element, it is now also used to refer to any fan story containing a romantic pairing between same-sex characters. Many fans distinguish slash with female characters as a separate genre, commonly referred to as femslash.
A fan convention is an event in which fans of a particular topic gather to participate and hold programs and other events, and to meet experts, famous personalities, and each other. Some also incorporate commercial activity. The term dates back to at least 1942.
Among science fiction and fantasy, comic book, and media fans, a Big Name Fan (BNF) is a member of a fandom who is particularly well-known and celebrated for their writings in fanzines, semi-professional magazines and blogs; or for other contributions such as art and fanfiction. Some BNFs have also contributed to the franchise itself. They may have fans of their own, who praise them and seek out their work.
Kirk/Spock, commonly abbreviated as K/S or Spirk and referring to James T. Kirk and Spock from Star Trek, is a popular pair in slash fiction, possibly the first slash pairing, according to Henry Jenkins, an early slash fiction scholar. Early in the history of Star Trek fan fiction, a few fan writers started writing about a romantic and sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock, highlighting a romantic or sexual element to the friendship between the men. As of 1998, most academic studies on slash fiction focused on Kirk/Spock, as Star Trek was by that point one of the longest-lived and most prosperous subjects of slash fiction, while its mainstream popularity made it one of the most accessible titles for academics and their audience. As the first slash pairing, K/S was created and developed largely independently from the influence of other slash fiction, with most of the conventions of the slash genre seeing their debut first in K/S slash.
In subcultural and fictional uses, a mundane is a person who does not belong to a particular group, according to the members of that group; the implication is that such persons, lacking imagination, are concerned solely with the mundane: the quotidian and ordinary. The term first came into use in science fiction fandom to refer, sometimes deprecatingly, to non-fans; this use of the term antedates 1955.
MediaWest*Con is one of the largest and longest running media-based fan-run conventions in the United States. It is held annually over Memorial Day weekend in Lansing, Michigan. The convention emerged in the late 1970s, beginning as T'Con in 1978 and 2'Con in 1979 before taking on the name MediaWest*Con in 1981. The convention remains the world's largest gathering of Fanzine writers, artists, and publishers, and for decades was the event where most new science fiction and fantasy Fanzines were released. The annual "Fan Quality Awards" for Fanzine excellence, known as the "Fan Q's", have been given out at MediaWest*Con since 1981. In addition, the convention's art show has been the principal location for the display and sale of published Fanzine art and illustrations.
Vidding is a fan labor practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way. The creator may choose video clips in order to focus on a single character, support a particular romantic pairing between characters, criticize or celebrate the original text, or point out an aspect of the TV show or film that they find under-appreciated. The resulting video may then be shared via one or more social media outlets and online video platforms such as YouTube. The creators refer to themselves as "vidders", their product as "vids", "fanvids", "fanvideos", "songvids", or the more recently adopted name "edits", the act itself referred to as vidding.
Fan labor, also called fan works, are the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works, visual or computer-assisted art, films and videos, animations, games, music, or applied arts and costuming.
Fan fiction or fanfiction is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator(s) as a basis for their writing. Fan fiction ranges from a couple of sentences to an entire novel, and fans can retain the creator's characters and settings and/or add their own. It is a form of fan labor. Fan fiction can be based on any fictional subject. Common bases for fan fiction include novels, movies, comics, musical groups, cartoons, anime, manga, and video games.
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit, fan activist organization. Its mission is to serve fans by preserving and encouraging transformative fan activity, known as "fanwork", and by making fanwork widely accessible.
Transformative Works and Cultures is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. The journal collects essays, articles, book reviews, and shorter pieces that concern fandom, fanworks, and fan practices. According to Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), the journal "supports the [Organization for Transformative Works's] mission to promote the legitimacy and sustainability of non-commercial fan creativity by providing a forum for innovative criticism in fan studies, broadly conceived."
Rebecca Tushnet is an American legal scholar. She serves as the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School. Her scholarship focuses on copyright, trademark, First Amendment, and false advertising.
Kandy Fong created the first fan videos in 1975, a slideshow of Star Trek images set to music. She is credited with creating the concept of "mash-ups", editing a TV show or a film by disconnecting the images from the original soundtrack and re-editing them to a song to tell a new story. Fong's media practice includes zine editing, short story writing, slideshow creation and sketch comedy.
Archive of Our Own is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users. The site was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works and went into open beta in 2009. As of 26 September 2023, Archive of Our Own hosts 11,770,000 works in over 60,260 fandoms. The site has received positive reception for its curation, organization, and design, mostly done by readers and writers of fanfiction.
Star Trek Lives! is a 1975 book, co-written by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, which explored the relationship between the Star Trek television series and the fandom that emerged following the series' cancellation. It was published by Bantam Books.
Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture is a nonfiction book of academic scholarship written in 1992 by television and media studies scholar Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers explores fan culture and examines fans' social and cultural impacts.
Kristina Dorothea Busse is a professor in the Philosophy department at the University of South Alabama. As the co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures, her research focuses on fanfiction communities and fan culture. Alongside fandom academics Alexis Lothian and Robin Anne Reid, she coined the term "queer female space" in 2007.
Karen L. Hellekson is an American author and scholar who researches science fiction and fan studies. In the field of science fiction, she is known for her research on the alternate history genre, the topic of her 2001 book, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, and has also published on the author Cordwainer Smith. In fan studies, she is known for her work on fan fiction and the culture of the fan community. She has co-edited two essay collections on fan fiction with Kristina Busse, and in 2008, co-founded the academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, also with Busse.
Fan studies is an academic discipline that analyses fans, fandoms, fan cultures and fan activities, including fanworks. It is an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, which emerged in the early 1990s as a separate discipline, and draws particularly on audience studies and cultural studies.
