"I'm Buffy, and you're history": Putting fan studies into history

Praxis Courtney A. Bates, The fan letter correspondence of Willa Cather: Challenging the divide between professional and common reader Stacey Pope & John Williams, "White shoes to a football match!": Female experiences of football's golden age in England Julia Sneeringer, John Lennon, autograph hound: The fan-musician community in Hamburg's early rockand-roll scene, 1960–65 Lisa Rose Stead, "So oft to the movies they've been": British fan writing and female audiences in the silent cinema

1. The work of fandom in the age of mechanical reproduction [1.1] This special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, guest edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, focuses on the intersection of history and fandom. The title of the special issue, "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," evokes Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935). Reagin and Rubenstein are academic historians who have also been active fans for decades. They have included essays that discuss only a sampling of the many fan communities that arose over the course of the twentieth century. Each group reflected the time and culture it was embedded in, and yet in all of them, we can see parallels to and reflections of modern fandoms. [1.2] As Reagin and Rubenstein note in their editorial essay, "'I'm Buffy, and you're history': Putting Fan Studies into History," despite the massproduced nature of popular artworks such as cinema, "large numbers of people shared similar experiences: they saw the identical film at the same time (or nearly), or danced to the same piece of popular music, or attended the same sporting matches, or read the same installments of a story that was being published serially in a popular magazine or newspaper" ( ¶4.6). Fans forged communities within a context of a shared activity or simultaneously consumed artwork, and historical analysis of these moments often occurs against the backdrop of technological change (such as the advent of cinema or the advent of the Internet). [1.3] As Reagin and Rubenstein point out, fandom did not start with Star Trek. This special issue addresses such varied topics as fan letters written in the early twentieth century United States, rockandroll fans in midtwentiethcentury Germany, movie 1. Introduction [1.1] In 1934, pulp fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs signed over the rights to his most popular character, Tarzan, to a brandnew production company that had promised him that it could translate his novels to film more accurately than had been done in earlier Tarzan productions. Burroughs fared about as well in his dealings with Hollywood as most authors who sell the rights to their imaginary worlds, however. The movie producers promptly announced that Tarzan was moving from Africa to Central America, and set up an expedition to film an eightchapterlong serial in Guatemala.
Guatemalan authorities welcomed this new industry to their Depressionravaged nation with alacrity, investing government funds in the production and offering newly excavated ancient Mayan ruins as locations for filming. [1.2] Local audiences already knew Tarzan very well through widely distributed comic strips imported from Mexico, and from earlier Hollywood Tarzan movies shown in Guatemala: Tarzan had a substantial fan base in Guatemala by the 1930s. Local people turned out to be far less welcoming than their government was, however. No protest accompanied the film crew's use of archaeological sites, but when they dared to enter the cathedral in the market town of Chichicastenango, a small riot ensued.
The skimpily dressed stars, the director, the cameramen, and other crew members, along with all their equipment and-for good measure-a visiting anthropologist and the local hotelier, were all chased out of town by a machetewielding crowd. Only the hotel manager ever returned to Chichicastenango, and although the serial was completed, no other Tarzan movie was ever filmed anywhere in Guatemala. quite pleased to see him as a tourist visiting the ruins left behind by ancient civilizations. But they were angered to the point of violence when it appeared that the movie crew were trying to depict (and probably misrepresent) important aspects of their real lives. For reasons having to do with local economic, cultural, and racial tensions and recent land grabs by German immigrant coffee entrepreneurs, as well as a long history of exploitative employment practices by huge US corporations operating in Guatemala, the residents of Chichicastenango did not want to be perceived as "natives" like the bit players in the background of the Tarzan movies they had already seen (Rubenstein 2003). [1.4] In order to understand why these particular Tarzan fans behaved very differently from other fans of Tarzan, we have to understand them in their historical context. Like the other fans discussed in this special issue, Guatemalan audiences of Tarzan had their own interpretations of important works in popular culture that had originated elsewhere (such as Tarzan), and their reactions were shaped by broader trends in economic and cultural history (such as the history of US corporations operating in Guatemala). And like all the fans discussed in this issue, they were willing to defend their interpretations passionately. [1.5] This special issue of TWC represents, as far as we know, the very first published collection of historical studies of fan communities and activities (note 1).
When we discuss "fans," we are referring to people who were active participants in popular culture, often decades earlier than is often acknowledged in modern fan studies. The groups discussed in this essay and issue include people who joined fan organizations and attended conventions; enthusiasts of a particular sports team, movie series, musical artist, or literary series who traveled to visit sites of particular importance to the object of their enthusiasm; those who made or collected artifacts (costumes, published programs and other texts, art) associated with their cherished hobby; those who exchanged letters in the columns of magazines catering to particular groups; and those who were involved in small, less formally organized groups of fans. [1.6] We hope that this edition of the journal initiates a conversation among scholars and fans (and people who are both) around a series of questions about the past: How did changes in the material conditions of leisure, entertainment, and play relate to changes in ordinary people's worldviews? What difference did the rise of mass media make in everyday life? How did changes in seemingly trivial everyday practices connect to larger social and cultural transformations? What was the relationship between participation in leisure activities and participation in politics? How did communities of fans contribute to historical change? Historians (and others) have been puzzling over some of these problems for many years; we expect that studying communities of fans ("fandoms") will bring new evidence and new perspectives to old debates. But some of these are newer questions; we believe that scholarly conversations about the 19th and 20th centuries are shifting in interesting directions, and we hope to encourage that process. [1.7] Above all, we hope to encourage fans-many of whom have written their own histories, while eagerly editing and correcting other narratives about themselves-to think about themselves in a broader historical context. Many fans have thought of fandom as separate from "the real world," the mundane realm in which we must earn a living and survive the daily pressures of our lives. We often cannot control the conditions under which we work, and we all live in societies where power, wealth, and influence operate within hierarchies that often seem far beyond our control; fandom, by contrast, can be an egalitarian haven in a heartless world. But we think it is possible for fans to experience their lives as fans in that special, separate world while understanding the ways in which fannish communities and activities are still entirely part of "the real world"-and are a part of the transformative forces that made the world what it is.
2. Every fan her own historian? What fan historians offer to fan communities  Like Bilbo Baggins writing the story of his adventures, individual fans sometimes write their own detailed accounts of key events and personalities in their community's history, and many are also deeply engaged amateur historians (note 2). But academic historians can offer something quite different: research and narratives that enable fans to connect their own particular fandom's story to much broader changes over time, locating themselves and their communities in a global history of culture. We can trace important social, legal, and economic changes that set the stage for the emergence of fan communities and show how fans participated in and had an impact on broader cultural change. [2.3] The sort of historical work that individual fans and small groups have undertaken varies considerably. Fans have occasionally written extremely detailed "insider" histories (or, more accurately, genealogies) of their fannish communities.
These insider histories, most often, are nostalgic in tone. Rich in fascinating detail, they usually trace the rise of one particular fandom, recounting the names of the key first fans of the team, story, or star around which the fandom centers; the fans' first encounters with each other; the obstacles that the organizers faced in linking fans with each other; the earliest meetings of groups of fans; the technological framework (e.g., mimeographs) that a fandom's founders had to operate within; or the first cons (if these were held), along with the names of those who attended. And of course such histories often include details about decadesold disputes within the fandom, since fans' passionate engagement with their chosen hobbies often leads to energetic and even acrimonious debates. One of the best insider histories of fans of the German popular author Karl May spends many pages on conflicts of all sorts. There were quarrels between organized May fans and May's estate, which held the copyright to his works. There were tensions between West German May fans, who wanted to make pilgrimages to May's birthplace and other places he had lived, and the East German state, where those places were located. And of course there were both spats and long standing grudges among different May fan groups (Heinemann 2000). [2.4] Insider histories like these are essential and sometimes wonderful sources for those who come later, both academic historians and younger fans. Fans have never needed help from anyone else-no matter what their professional credentials-to produce these histories, and the articles in this special issue are not intended primarily as contributions to the ongoing production of insider histories by fans. communities and of the authors, film stars or musicians, movies, books, sports teams, or musical forms that they are engaged with (note 4). The predilection of fans to collect or reconstruct sites or artifacts that are important to their particular interests has often led them to build treasure troves that form rich testimonials to the history of material and popular culture. [2.6] Academic historians have something else to offer fans. Historians are interested in the ways that communities develop over time. We study individuals' struggles for survival and their efforts at making more interesting, exciting, or satisfying lives for themselves, because we understand that these efforts can add up to or reflect transformative changes in the world. Thus, we can see not only how changes in the wider world changed fans' practices, but also how fans' actions helped change the world.
3. What professional historians offer to fan communities [3.1] For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth.
-Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens, The Fellowship of the Ring [3.2] In a voiceover during the opening credits of the 2001 film The Fellowship of the Ring, elf princess Galadrial laments the changes she senses in the world, noting the rise of humans and the retreat of magic. And indeed, in the novels on which the Lord of the Rings films are based, the author reserves his most scathing condemnation for those, like the evil wizard Saruman, who turn to industrialized mass production (note 5). But although fans have long loved the idyllic, preindustrial world of Tolkien's elves, hobbits, and Ents, it was the very social, legal, and economic changes that Tolkien deplored that made the emergence of modern fandoms possible. [3.3] Copyright is a good example. There is no such notion in Tolkien's Middleearth: elves tell and retell their histories over centuries and aeons. The concept of an individual author who could create a literary text and lay sole claim to the right to reproduce it did not exist in the human cultures that first created the Iliad and the Arthurian legends (both of which include contributions from multiple authors), either.
The legal idea of copyright, and the broader body of intellectual property rights law that it belongs to, first emerged in the Englishspeaking world during the 18th century -the first British copyright law was passed in 1709-and an international agreement on copyright was only established in 1886 (Sherman and Bently 1999). The creation and enforcement of copyright was key to the development of novels as a literary form during the 18th and 19th centuries, since it meant that more people could now aspire to make a living by writing. [3.4] Copyright law joined with a new understanding of an individual author or artist as a creative genius-especially among the early 19thcentury Western European Romantics-to make possible the understanding that a particular text, song, or work of art could be owned. This was a precondition for the later opposition between fans and copyright holders, and between the "original" works, often called "canon" by fans, and fans' own interpretations and reworkings of these nowcopyrighted forms of popular culture. If there were no single authorowner of a text, then the term "fan" wouldn't have much meaning, either, at least in many literary, musical, and artistic fandoms.
Similarly, sports fandoms depend on the existence of professional teams-often with trademarked logos or names-which began to emerge during the late 19th century in many parts of the world (note 6). Fans could then begin to organize into communities during the early 20th century, united by their enthusiasm for (or sometimes by their opposition to) the author, artist, team, or band. "Fanon," the set of beliefs about a beloved object of fannish attention that are shared within a fannish community, could only form in opposition or contrast to canon (the original texts, art, music, or team that inspired the fandom). To use Walter Benjamin's analysis: the original was the work of art, and the fan works were the copies, and merely making the copies brought into question the original creator's ownership of (or authority over) the original. [3.5] Intellectual property laws were only the first of a series of broader social changes that began around 1850 and laid the foundations for modern fan communities. Other prerequisites for modern fandoms included the growth in literacy rates that followed the spread of public education in the mid and late 19th century in Western Europe and parts of North America, urbanization, a rapid decline (resulting from technological innovations and the opening of the New World forests) in the cost of papermaking and printing, the reduction or abolition of special taxes on newspapers and some other sorts of printed works, and the increasing ease and affordability of transportation in many parts of the world, so that publications could be mailed and national-even international-reading markets could develop. [3.6] These changes underlay the explosive growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of many kinds of cheap printed materials that became interesting reading for fans. Newspapers reported on events important to fans, especially those of sports and films. Magazines did the same. Pulp fiction and genre fiction of all sorts was published in North America and Europe, and, after 1900, in many other parts of the world: detective stories and lurid "truecrime" periodicals; westerns; comics, which started in newspapers but soon escaped to form a genre of their own; sports journalism and novels dealing with polo, rugby, cricket, baseball, horse racing, and football; romances; and what became known as "weird fiction" during the early 20th century and developed into the genre of science fiction. Additionally, calendars contained chromolith printed illustrations, and music lovers collected sheet music. [3.7] Migrations also set the stage for the emergence of global and local fandoms. In the 19th century, nationstates in Europe and the Americas created national cultures as part of the process of state formation, inventing and refining "traditions"-regional costumes like the Scottish kilt and the German Tracht, national holidays such as Thanksgiving in the United States-as a way to explain what it meant to belong to these societies. But this process was challenged by massive movements of people across borders and from rural to urban settings. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century and continuing into the present day, immigrants came to the New World from Europe and Asia, indigenous and Africandescended people moved within and between the nations of the Americas, European colonialists entered and withdrew from large parts of Asia and Africa, and rural people all over the world moved to cities. All these people carried with them the ideas, memories, and material goods in which their cultures and identities lived. [3.8] We can see conflicts between such traveling cultures and new local realities, and sometimes even resolutions of such conflict, in the ways that ordinary city dwellers responded collectively to mass media and made popular culture of their own. For example, the Portugueseborn singer Carmen Miranda rose to fame in Brazil in the early 1930s as the greatest singer of samba in its first decades as a recorded (and therefore national) art form: she made herself Brazilian by singing local music, while costuming herself as a local stereotypical and sexualized AfroBrazilian food vendor. In Carmen Miranda's later career as a Hollywood icon of exoticism, she was rejected vehemently by most Brazilians; it was only after her death in 1955 that Brazilian fans claimed her as their own once again, turning her funeral procession in Rio de Janeiro into a celebratory parade. By returning Carmen Miranda to her status as a true Brazilian in such a public way, her fans claimed a cosmopolitan, urban Brazilian identity for themselves while rewriting the history of the most important local musical form. Carmen Miranda's career, and the ways in which her fans "repurposed" her image after her death, is a good case study full of interesting material for historians to study: how Hollywood used exotic "others" in popular culture, the commercialization of folk cultures by mass commercial media, and the nationalization of regional cultures by the Brazilian state; but also how Brazilian fans used her and the music she popularized to create new identities and to promote a globalized musical genre. [3.9] More broadly, the global history of recorded popular music and its fans exemplifies the complexities of fan identification across racial, as well as national, boundaries. For example, rock music famously developed out of AfricanAmerican forms rooted in the rural southern United States, but developed in the context of the AfricanAmerican migration to the cities of the north. The cold war-era extension of US culture globally, through radio as well as tourism and, crucially, US military involvement around the world, created music fans who grew to understand the roots of this music in the southern United States. Such famous fans as British rockers from Mick Jagger through Elvis Costello ended up searching Memphis or New Orleans for "authentic" older AfricanAmerican musicians with whom they could make music (sometimes while criticizing similar efforts by white US musicians as "inauthentic").
These wealthy white English men temporarily imagined themselves as workingclass African Americans, an act full of cultural contradictions and political possibilities for music fans in the United Kingdom, the United States, and around the world. [3.10] Crossethnic and crossracial identification was not limited to music fans: in Germany, enthusiastic fans of Karl May and other German western novelists sometimes formed "cowboy and Indian" clubs, researching and crafting their own costumes and artifacts in order to reproduce the material culture of an (imagined) American West. Like the British rockers, German "cowboys and Indians" throughout the 20th century (under quite varied political regimes) went to enormous lengths to create an "authentic" experience, immersing themselves in ethnological collections and (when they could) getting advice or even training from Native Americans. The political possibilities, ironies, and contradictions were profound in this case, too, as (astonishingly, from some points of view) German "Indians" frequently saw themselves as possessing hardearned crossethnic authenticity, which they could use in varied ways to challenge German political authorities (Reagin 2009a; Borries 2008). [3.11] By 1900, large and enthusiastic audiences had developed for all these new forms of mass media and popular culture, and the preconditions were there for the emergence of organized fan communities, as the most deeply engaged fans began to seek each other out. Literary fandoms, like early science fiction fan groups and the fandom that organized around Sherlock Holmes stories, are probably among the best known today, but fan communities coalesced around other interests as well during the early 20th century, including music, dance, and sports. Literary fandoms' histories are probably the most interesting to those who seek to understand the origins and history of fan fiction, but academic historians do not restrict their interests only to literary fandoms. There were and are a huge variety of fandoms whose transformative valuable object) achieved wild popularity even though they were no easier to understand than Picasso's paintings. [4.6] This withering worried Benjamin, who respected the revolutionary intentions of some of the European avantgarde, but it also encouraged him. Chaplin's fans, he observed, might be seen as participating in dismantling a whole structure of ideas about property and power. That such participation would be a collective affairundertaken by groups of enthusiasts-would naturally flow from the fact that, as Benjamin noted, mechanically reproduced mass commercial art was usually experienced in groups. Now large numbers of people shared similar experiences: they saw the identical film at the same time (or nearly), or danced to the same piece of popular music, or attended the same sporting matches, or read the same installments of a story that was being published serially in a popular magazine or newspaper. [4.7] And that is why it makes sense for historians to study fan communities in themselves, as well as seeing fans as representative of other kinds of historical processes: the story of the changing relationship between fans and the objects and narratives they love helps to explain certain aspects of the modern world. Twentieth century elites promulgated a large but limited set of entertainments, including apocalyptic movies, love songs on the radio, TV cop shows, and cheap paperback thrillers. And fans took those stories and made something else out of them. As they did so, intentionally or unintentionally they were also pushing back against the boundaries of their times, the constraints imposed by gender, race, class, culture, or politics: the articles in this special issue include several good case studies of such interactions. Intentionally or unintentionally, fans were building alternative societies to the ones they lived in. This has important implications for the study of other kinds of historical transformations and processes. For example, the articles in this volume touch on the involvement of fan communities in the rise of the New Woman in the 1920s, the renewed idealization of domesticity after World War II, and the politics of the cold war in Europe and the United States, as well as discussing how these broader changes affected fans of particular forms of popular culture. But fandoms matter in themselves, for their own sakes, as well. [which] formed for its own season, as regular a portion of miscellaneous chat as 'How are you?'" (quoted in Hayward 1997, 31). By the late 19th century, fans were protesting developments they disliked, and sometimes letting the author know in no uncertain terms: when Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes (whom he'd grown tired of writing) in 1893, pleading and abusive letters arrived at his publishers by the sackload, and fans badgered him for years to bring Holmes back (Booth 1997, 190). [4.9] Networks of organized groups of fans first appeared in Europe and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, exchanging letters and then forming clubs with complicated rules and-luckily for historians-detailed recordkeeping. These groups were at first composed, by and large, of elite men. Spectator sports were a lowbrow pastime, but the first organized groups of sports fans were composed of local elites, as C. L. R. James recorded in his memoir of cricket in colonial and postcolonial Trinidad, Beyond a Boundary (1963). This had changed by the mid20th century. Movies and recorded music attracted fans from many class locations-and from many geographical locations, as these were portable (and exportable) fandoms. [4.10] Technological change in the 20th century shaped fan history-or, to put it better, fans were quicker than most groups of people to make creative intellectual use of new technologies. Over the course of the century, forms of mass media multiplied, media became ever more ubiquitous, costs declined, and, globally, literacy rates increased enough to make it possible for many more people to read comic books and follow movie subtitles. New technologies made it simpler for ordinary people to produce, edit, and distribute their own media narratives. Long before the Internet, fans used hobbyist photographic setups, telephones, film cameras, tape recorders, mimeograph machines, home movie cameras, industrial staplers, and other innovations to organize themselves and to make and distribute their own creative transformations of the media they loved (note 10). The advent of relatively cheap leisure travel and the infrastructure that supported it-and even the global dislocations of the world wars-set fans into motion on a broader scale after 1945, making it possible for them to meet more often in person, and even undertake fan pilgrimages, as well as corresponding by mail. [4.11] Obviously none of this was a simple or linear process, nor did it take place in the same way in rich parts of the world as it did in poor ones. And we are talking here about, at first, only very small groups of people, widely dispersed. But around the world, throughout the 20th century and into the present day, people organized themselves to struggle to participate in mass media narratives, putting impressive amounts of energy and thought into increasing their control over their chosen hobbies -although these entertainments might be legally owned by foreign corporations, like Hollywood studios-and thus making more pleasure available to themselves and each other in their daily lives.

5.
What academic history has to offer fan studies [5.1] "Now," said Holmes, when the rejoicing lackey had disappeared, "having secured the future, we can afford to be more lenient with the past." -A. Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Priory School" [5.2] Much scholarship in fan studies has emphasized the importance of a single historical change: the advent of the Internet within some fandoms, starting in the early 1990s. But awareness of this recent history has not always resulted in an appreciation of the significance of other, much earlier social and economic developments for earlier fan communities and for popular culture as a whole (note 11). And while fan studies usually acknowledges the existence of science fiction fandom before the 1960s, other early literary fandoms are seldom mentioned (note 12). Moreover, fan studies has often-for understandable reasons-focused on fan communities that did specific kinds of transformative creative work. This sometimes narrow focus has led scholars to ignore wellorganized fan communities that indeed contested cultural authority, especially if these originated outside of the United States and Western Europe. [5.3] As a result, the novelty of modern fan communities is often overestimated in research that sometimes seems to assume that fandom began with Star Trek. The ways in which fans formed appreciative and mutually encouraging audiences for one another's creativity, the fact that fans often contended with the producers of commercial mass culture or copyright holders over the "moral ownership" of a particular canon, and the tendency of fans to offer their own interpretations and critiques of their objects of fandom: these patterns all were well established in a variety of fandoms well before World War II, as the articles in this issue, as well as other recent work on the history of fan communities, demonstrate.
[5.4] A more nuanced appreciation of the history of fan communities also offers the benefit of disrupting and usefully complicating what has been a simplified shared historical narrative within fan discussions. Many media fans trace the origins of their fandoms to groups organized around TV shows of the 1960s, like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek. These groups formed during the late 1960s and 1970ssome of their members had been active earlier in science fiction fandom-and much of their efforts went toward zine publication during this initial period. The watershed moment in their history-which inaugurated the Second Age of fandom-came with their transition to the Internet in the early 1990s (note 13). Fans' accounts and fan studies scholarship, then, have reinforced each other in acknowledging only these two time periods. While we agree that these two developments were important, they do not constitute a complete history. If we fail to develop a more complex, careful, and detailed understanding of the past, we risk misinterpreting the present and underestimating the ways that fans have shaped the world.  [6.2] Research on the history of fans and the communities they built will be fruitful and interesting for many audiences. It will help fans to place their own groups' histories within a much broader historical framework, and will make clear the parallels with fandoms in other times and places, as well as the ways in which their own communities might be unique. It will help historians to appreciate the cultural phenomena they study more broadly, tracing the evolution of particular forms of entertainment across varying media forms, and better understanding fans without forcing them into illfitting interpretive frameworks. And it will usefully complicate the somewhat simplified historical narrative that often predominates in fan studies, as well as bringing to the fore the ways that global migration, cultural exchanges, and broader social change influenced the playing field upon which fandoms operated. [6.3] Two of the articles in this special issue highlight this sort of cultural exchange in finegrained case studies, showing how fans reinterpreted popular culture from abroad within their own social and historical contexts, claiming it as their own. Julia Sneeringer's research on early German rockandroll fans in Hamburg discusses how they repurposed commercial forms of entertainment offered to them, forming cross class and transnational forms of generational solidarity in the process. Sneeringer's study is firmly situated within the context of cold war-era West Germany, as well, and shows how fans' actions are best understood when analyzed against their particular historical backdrops. Lisa Stead's study of female British fans of silent movies shows how they tried to engage in similar negotiations and alliances with those who produced or promoted the movies that they loved; these movie enthusiasts appreciated American models of gender and style, while still celebrating specifically English actresses whose performances and personal presentation they identified with more closely. Stead analyzes this fandom within the larger transnational history of the rise of the "New Woman." Both Stead and Sneeringer show how local fans attempted to "talk back" to local cultural authorities, defending their tastes and choices and asserting a sort of moral ownership of their objects of fandom (movies and music, respectively). [6.4] The article by Courtney Bates offers us a historical framework for fans' interactions with both the copyright holders and each other. Bates's work examines the fan letters sent to American author Willa Cather, making it clear that fan letters from this period need to be analyzed against other modes of reading and responding to texts that were popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fan letters, she argues, became an attractive option for many readers because they assumed repeated readings and emotional responses to the text, and they ultimately developed into their own genre. [6.5] Finally, two of these articles focus on ways that changes and continuities in gender have informed fans' experiences, and how fans' actions have responded toand even challenged-gender ideologies. Stead's article argues that choosing a favorite movie star, as well as the nature and intensity of a fan's engagement with her favorite, was a way for some English women to chose among newer and older models of who an Englishwoman might be. John Williams and Stacey Pope use oral histories to examine the experiences of a group-female soccer fans in postwar England-who were almost erased in later work on English sports fans. In their article, we see some female fans making a claim to male prerogatives, while others used their activities as fans to reinforce their status as feminine caregivers. Both these articles belong to a strand of historiography that views women (and nongendercompliant men) as surviving in patriarchal societies by building communities, reinventing themselves, and finding private escapes as readers and fans (see Russo 1987; SmithRosenberg 1975; Radway 1991; Laqueur 2004. [6.6] These articles hint at what a research agenda that included historically grounded, finegrained studies of transformative works and cultures might bring both to fan studies and to the history of popular culture. Such research might help fan studies to expand its focus beyond late 20thcentury fandoms in the Englishspeaking world-where fans produced primarily literary transformative works-to examine fandoms in other linguistic and cultural contexts. Historically grounded case studies would also reveal the interactions among fandoms, since ideas, entertainments, and pastimes crossed national boundaries and were incorporated into the lives of people who often pursued more than one hobby or enthusiasm (note 14). Research conducted along those lines could also contribute greatly to our knowledge about the interactions between fan communities and what is called "Americanization" in some national histories and "cultural imperialism" in others: the importation and reworking of material goods, narratives, imagery, ideology, and other aspects of life and thought that originated in the United States. [6.7] Political struggles around popular culture and mass media characterized the cold war era. Some scholars and political activists feared that television, rock and roll, and especially comic books would corrupt impressionable youth, turning them intodepending on the political orientation of the person doing the worrying-capitalist automatons or morally weak communists (note 15). Meanwhile, many governments tried to strengthen national cultures by banning some forms of imported media and funding locally made equivalents.

Conclusion
[6.8] Some fan communities engaged in these cold war-era battles by developing passionate attachments to hardtoget material goods from far away-sometimes from the "other side" of the Iron Curtain-and others by showing wholehearted support for local sports teams or movie idols. Such support sometimes took complicated and ambiguous forms. In East Germany, passionate fans of Karl May's westerns convinced East German Communist authorities to allow them to dress up and do roleplay as Native Americans by arguing that "Indians" were oppressed indigenous peoples, and that cowboys were upstanding members of the American rural proletariat; East German officials were frustrated by the UScentric nature of this fandom, but generally allowed members of the community to create costumes and do role play nonetheless. [6.9] In the United States, controversies among science fiction fans reflected cold war politics as well, particularly around the morality of and policy for the use of nuclear weapons, and paralleled the rise of the libertarian branch of the right wing in US politics. The popularity of Robert Heinlein and other libertarian science fiction writers during the 1950s is yet another example of how fan communities are always products of a particular time and place. As the cold war deescalated in the early 1970s, changing fannish identities intersected with the rise of identity politics in the United States. The controversies surrounding the increased visibility of female and gay and lesbian fans in science fiction was an early example of this trend; by the middle of the decade, tensions around racialized identities were all too visible in the split between fans of disco and fans of heavy metal music. In all these cases, communities of fans should be understood in the context of the cold war, to help us both understand fans better and make better sense out of the cold war.
[6.10] And of course many other lines of inquiry suggest themselves as we start thinking historically about audiences, fans, fan works, and fan communities. We expect that interactions among historians, other scholars, and fans (and those who fall into more than one category) will inspire research that uncovers new sorts of evidence and helps us to ask new questions of those sources. We're confident that this work will offer fans a broader context for their own communities and can demonstrate that fan communities have always contributed to cultural and social change. Participatory culture is, in fact, a deeply rooted phenomenon-more than today's fans might realize 8. As one instance out of hundreds of this phenomenon, consider Emilio García Riera's magisterial Breve historia del cine mexicano (1999). In part, this is explained by the fact that, like all historians, cultural historians are sometimes so preoccupied with mastering the historiography and sources for one time and place that they feel unable to broaden their focus (and readings). But when addressing a topic like the history of fans and popular reception, which must be aware of global cultural exchanges, diffusion, and reworkings of transnational narratives, a limited focus can produce particularly uneven results. 12. An exception here is the work of Rebecca Pearson (1997,2007); see also Brooker (2005). None of these is historically focused, but all offer excellent insights into literary fandoms that focus on older literary canons.
13. This periodization is used, for example, in Coppa (2006). While Coppa's essay offers a brief but accurate narrative (and is, after all, a short account of the recent history of only one branch of fandom), it is difficult to find work that goes beyond this periodization when discussing the broader history of fandoms.
14. For a typical example of how individuals might combine more than one fandom in their lives, see the epilogue to Flanery (1981), in which the author discusses how she and a friend produced SF zines and attended conventions together-but also belonged to a bowling league.  Canfield's works included The Brimming Cup (1921) and The HomeMaker (1925). Cather's bestselling work included her World War I novel One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and Shadows on the Rock, which was published in 1931-the same year she appeared on Time magazine's cover (Woodress 1987, 433). While

Introduction
Cather might have had more standing as a major American author, Canfield was also recognized as an educational reform activist and a literary critic with national voice in the BOMC. As a judge for the Club, Canfield certainly had the authority to declare or profess her support for Cather. She might have also reviewed Cather from the position of a fellow author or friend. Yet she positions herself in a confessional and intimate position, implying that she imagines recommendations are felt more strongly when they come from a fan. [1.2] This article focuses primarily on unpublished announcements of fandom found in the 54 fan letters sent to and saved by Cather, which are held by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Special Collections and which have received little scholarly attention. [1.3] Nevertheless, I begin with Canfield's statement because it helps me extend the work of fan studies scholars like Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills, who describe the subjectposition of the acafan, which blurs the distinctions previously made between the academic and the fan. Today's literary scholars often draw a sharp distinction between common readers, usually located in private diaries, letters, and book marginalia, and professional readers such as university academics and magazine reviewers, who had public platforms for publishing their trained and influential opinions. I would like to use Jenkins's and Hills's momentum to challenge that division. Unlike many current scholars, Cather recognized the flexibility of the two categories when she asked Canfield to critique a draft of her World War I novel One of Ours by "read[ing] simply as the general reader might, in order to spot errors or false notes" (Stout 2007, 36). Canfield likely would have appreciated such directions since she also corresponded with her own fans throughout her career. Jennifer Parchesky's "'You Make Us Articulate': Reading, Education, and Community in Dorothy Canfield's Middlebrow America" offers a thoughtful analysis of Canfield's fan letters. Parchesky briefly acknowledges that fan letters were "a genre of amateur writing that was widely accepted and even conventionalized" (2002,232), and even notes that Canfield's archive contains "admiring letters from publishers, editors, critics, professionals, and other writers [who] use much the same enthusiastic rhetoric as those from Canfield's other fans." Yet Parchesky mostly uses fan letters as a reflection of a developing third mode of reading, neither high nor lowbrow but belonging to an emergent middle class' reading values, which emphasize reading as a project of lifelong learning. Parchesky focuses on readers' attitudes toward reading as reflected in the letters, in which they see themselves as an important cultural middle ground between the entertainmentfocused masses and the pretentious literary elite. [1.5] My own project, however, focuses on the fan letter itself as a platform appropriated by many kinds of readers who are attracted to its practices, discourse, and the possibility of a more personalized readerauthor relationship. This article will demonstrate that although the methods of reading and readerly values of fan letters were at odds with professional approaches taught at the time, this difference made the format attractive to professionals, nonprofessionals, and Cather herself. The letters sent to Cather reveal an alternative mode of reading equally approachable and attractive enough for both groups. In some cases, such as Canfield's review, professionals appropriate the methods of fan letters when its rhetoric promises to engage or persuade the reading public. At other times, professionals, whom we would imagine as having some degree of satisfying cultural influence, supplement that position by corresponding with authors in private fan mail. Fan letters offer a specific, gratifying mode of reading and authorial interaction unavailable elsewhere. [1.6] To be sure, individuals that we might consider common, nonprofessional readers appear in Cather's archive, whether selfidentified as soldier, nurse, mother, or lawyer. Professionals-teacher, professor, published author-write her as well.
Rather than merely acknowledging that Cather's archive holds letters from a mixed company of individuals, I argue that we should attribute her varied readership to the attractions of fan letter discourse. By this time, the conventions of fan letter discourse were relatively well established. Educators often assigned students the task of writing fan letters as a way to practice their letterwriting skills and learn lessons of moral value from worthy public or published figures (Ryan 2002, 169; Parchesky 2002, 253).
Fans often declare themselves as fans in the opening lines of their letters. The announcement takes many forms, such as imagining that a letter by such an appreciative stranger would be perceived as a welcome pleasure or, as in Annie Kimball's letter, a "trespass on the time of a busy author, even in the form of 'bouquets and thanks' for literary pleasure enjoyed" (Slote Collection).
[1.7] Although professional and common readers often used the format and rhetoric of fan letters, contemporary scholars set the two in opposition with one another. In her essay "Becoming Noncanonical: The Case against Willa Cather" (1989), Sharon O'Brien argues that fan letters promoted an alternative reader relationship, which concludes as a zerosum game between common and professional readers (note 1).
She contends that Cather treated fan letters as "evidence that the reader/writer relationship could resemble the private bonds of affection and friendship; her letters from readers doubtless helped her to keep writing by offsetting the criticism of her Professor's House as a widely circulated, serialized novel in Collier's or a finely printed book. He suggests that "the physical form of Collier's encouraged its reader to read its contents quickly…they expected fictions in the magazine to provide easy entertainment," whereas the book form would appeal to more formally trained readers. Those readers, more sympathetic to the main character of the professor, would exhibit a willingness for "extended perusal" and "arduous exercises in literary interpretation" (92). Yet as we will see, the letters Cather chose to keep and her preferred reading practices eschew both the disposable and exegete reading methods that Johannigsmeier attributes to each form.
[1.8] Cather's exchange of letters with her readers should be attributed to more than an egodriven expression of mutual admiration; both reader and author have complex reasons for engaging with each other. For fans, the attraction may seem obvious, since the platform allowed readers personalized, direct contact with an admired author. Despite readers' assertions that their experience of the text was somehow complete, emotionally or aesthetically, the fan letter reveals the desire to supplement that experience. Readers mitigate their own sense of anonymity by writing back to the author their own story-the fan letter is an attempt to make the author inhabit the reader's space and experience. Fan letters can assuage the disconcerting contradiction that readers are both deeply familiar with and also unknown to their favorite authors. The subsequent reply allows readers to test the reality of their connection with an author and possibly reassure them they had read the text rightly. Yet Cather herself valued the experience, as seen in her careerlong engagement with readers. For Cather, fan letters created an individuated authorreader relationship and supplied criteria for evaluation based on the knowledge available to a general reader: their emotional responses and familiarity with scenes that Cather describes and their devoted, repeated readings of her texts. Further, she used them to confirm her writings had elicited emotional response from her readers, since Cather preferred estimating the value of a work based on its emotional impact rather than a more formal assessment of its craft. In some cases, they facilitated Cather's enjoyment of a kind of writingback, in which fans gave her the chance to return imaginatively to places that she had written about or hear more about subjects that she had depicted.
[1.9] Though it is impossible to get an exact count of Cather's reader correspondence, she received hundreds if not thousands of fan letters. Lewis noted that a "flood of letters…poured in to her" (1953, 187). Cather took steps to moderate the deluge (publishing open letters, creating biographical pamphlets for her editor to distribute, hiring a secretary to screen her incoming mail), but she nonetheless devoted a great deal of time to replying to her fans. Cather began replying as early as 1913, though the existing correspondence suggests that the volume of mail dramatically increased after the publication of One of Ours in 1922. She often replied to readers in the military, noting to her editor Ferris Greenslet in 1945 that she had "so many letters from soldiers that they became emotionally wearing" (Cather 2007(Cather , 1693. Janis Stout's A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather includes summaries of over 50 surviving letters in which Cather seems to be replying to fans. As we will see, Cather thought of such correspondence as expressly private and disallowed readers' requests to publish her replies. This refusal has its reciprocal for today's scholars: current Cather scholars struggle with a continued inability to quote directly from any of her personal correspondence, which she prohibited in her will. In this article, the third person paraphrases of Cather's private letters, made available more broadly by Calendar of Letters, must substitute for direct quotations from her private letters (note 2).
[1.10] These fan letters are not a random sampling of the letters from readers that Cather received, although it is important to acknowledge some of the mystery of how these letters survived after Cather's death. Rather, Cather enjoyed these kinds of letters enough to preserve them during her life. In a short response to a request from 1922, she wrote, "Sorry she is not at home and can't provide letters from ordinary readers," indicating that she saved mail from those she considered general readers (Jewell and Stout 2007, 0611). Her guidelines were clear cut, as suggested by an answer to a fan in 1931: "Out of many fan letters, it is easy to recognize one of substance" (Jewell and Stout, 1033 (Lewis 1953, 122).
[1.11] Cather certainly received a number of negative letters; some she forwarded to friends and family to illustrate and decry their offensive nature. One reply indicated that she occasionally answered such notes, as she wrote in 1924 to a Mr. Miller: "Sorry he is irritated by her writing, but he will go on being irritated. Does not agree with his standard of judgment. Writes to please herself. Reason she took the male point of view in Antonia was certainly not to try to sound like a man" (Jewell and Stout 2007, 0750). Evidently Cather did not preserve negative letters, and they do not appear in the UNL archives. Although after the publication of One of Ours (the book most represented in the UNL archive) Cather complained to a friend that she "keeps getting accusing letters from pacifists who think the book extols war," no such opinion is preserved in those fan letters (Jewell and Stout 2007, 0620). Largely it seems she ignored and discarded negative letters. Each surviving letter in the UNL archive testifies to the readers' enjoyment of Cather's works, whether written as long panegyrics or in a few, appreciative sentences.
2. Not "dry-as-dust" professors but the warmth of readers [2.1] In the 1890s, Cather's college coursework at the University of Nebraska in English and composition exposed her to the first professional mode that she rejectedphilology, which replaced an emotional response to the text with an objective study of minute linguistic patterns. This relatively new, scientific approach to language focused on the analysis of single sounds, words, and grammatical construction, along with historical facts such as bibliography, sources, and translation (Graff 1987, 39). Using these formalized methods of a developing discipline, English departments distanced their own academic methods of reading from the evaluative "criticism of taste" written by reviewers airing their refined literary opinions in print (Shumway 1994, 108).
Cather's experience led her to conclude in a letter to a friend, "she had decided she could never be a scholar, that she was not meant for that" (Lewis 1953, 32). Cather felt, according to Lewis, that such elaborate, even mathematical textual analysis "reduced all that was great in literature, the noblest flights of the human spirit, to dry asdust, arbitrary formulae" (1953,34). The vestiges of philological methods-and Cather's aversion for it-remained after it fell out of wider academic fashion in the following century. For example, in a 1928 letter to Burgess Johnson, an English professor of whom she seemed to approve, Cather derided this larger tendency: "Most English teachers have never actually written a thing and think being scholarly means avoiding any taint of common sense. One critic makes a big point of the broad a sounds in female names in her books. Could quote others equally foolish" (Jewell and Stout 2007, 0933).
[2.2] Her antipathy toward academic habits would reappear in her admission that she "mostly sends a form letter to students and to English teachers" in reply to their letters, a particularly canny response to those who appear to build their career around "arbitrary formulae" of literary analysis (Jewell andStout 2007, 1490). [2.3] Those instructors and students deserved such treatment, according to Cather, since they also had the distasteful habit of explaining a text through outside information. Her comment in "On Death Comes for the Archbishop" that "it is foolish convention that we must have everything interpreted for us in written language" seems to also apply to the aversion she felt toward the English instructors' role of exegete (1949, 6). At a time when Cather was arguing that great literature could speak directly to the reader, other authors, critics, and publishers were making the case that highbrow literature could only be approached with the help of another trained individual who had a grasp of the text's technique (Travis 1998, 26). Cather resisted the assumption that readers needed special training to enjoy a text; replying to one fan, Mr. Phillipson, she asserted that it was "not a disaster to miss out on a college education" (Jewell andStout 2007, 1539). [2.4] Rather than elite interpretive training, Cather and her selected fans based their readerly authority on descriptions of emotive response to a text. Cather said in a 1925 interview, "A writer's own interest in a story is the essential thing. If there is a flash of warmth in him it is repeated in the reader. The emotion is bigger than style…An artist has an emotion, and the first thing that he wants to do with it is to find some form to put it in, a design" (Cather 1986a, 78). Cather's confirmation that she has gotten to the essential thing depends on its reception and reflection by readers. For some fans, the signs of their visceral responses evince their careful reading. Elmer Ellsworth wrote, "I turned the last page [of One of Ours] several hours ago, but my throat still dully aches-choked by all the things which 'Claude's' simple story has made me feel" (Southwick Collection). Sallie Neve wrote of Death Comes for the Archbishop, "I shed many tears of course-who wouldn't-but best of all I caught the spirit of courage from brave Father Joseph Vaillant and a new peace with God from Dear Bishop Latour.
Never have I read a more beautiful story and one which left so lasting an impression on me" (Macdonald in Southwick Collection). Langston Hughes, whose literary star had been secured in the firmament in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, certainly could have found an audience for a published review of Cather's novel on a slave holding family and one slave's ultimate escape to Canada. Instead, he sent a private, singlesentence letter. He, too, uses the rhetoric of emotional sensitivity: "Thank you for your moving and beautiful book of 'Sapphira and the Slave Girl,' and for the sympathy with which you have treated my people" (Southwick Collection, photocopy, figure 1). While these fans may write at varying lengths and with differing methods of illustrating their relationship to the text, their consistent description of their emotional response assures Cather that the mark she aimed for had been struck. 3. Not how-to but "how do you…" [3.1] Although fans undoubtedly found direct contact with an author enticing, Cather's expectations for her readers-and their methods as reflected in the fan letters -showcased the importance of reading obliquely. In Not Under Forty, Cather says about the reading experience and artistic creation: "Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there-that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel" (1939, 50). Long before 1936, when Cather would write the preceding in "The Novel Demeuble," Cather's fans suggested that they listened for this impression while reading. Further, the rhetoric they use to describe its detection is often as indirect as "the thing not named" in the novel. Fans often describe their vigorous effort to see a pattern in the prose through analogy rather than a clear explanation of the craft itself. Using the metaphor of a "rare piece of lace woven with an intricate design," Robert Raines wrote to Cather in 1922 about One of Ours, calling its pattern "more discernable to some than others-each according to his appreciation and understanding" (Southwick Collection, figure 2). In the same year, Coleman McCampbell would describe Cather's writerly voice using the metaphor of "a buoy held under water-restrained but exerting a constant pull" (Southwick Collection). In the same gesture, the readers affirm their closeness to Cather, praise her writing, and assert their own discernment of the text's meaning without risking or compromising it.  limitations. Suzanne Chapin likened herself to a character at the outset of her letter, "I don't know how to express myself-I feel like Claude after his talk with Mademoiselle de Courcy" (Southwick Collection). Coleman McCampbell wrote that he "can't shout the usual words of extravagant praise like 'extraordinary,' 'remarkable,' 'revelation,' 'masterpiece,' 'superb'-for they fall flat and colorless" next to her book, much like the understatement of "isn't it wonderful?" when applied to the Grand Canyon (Southwick Collection). A former soldier said he "cannot express the emotions which you have aroused" from his days of camaraderie (Southwick Collection). They depict their emotional response to Cather's written word as so profound that it limits their ability to speak to her. This failure of selfexpression actually demonstrates their emotional sensitivity and apprehension. The frequent expression of deep emotional resonance and the humble gesture of their own writerly lack suggests that these are features that Cather thought worthy of collecting. After the turn of the century, the academic vogue of philology declined as English departments recognized a limited need for trained philologists. Instead, they shifted to the larger task of educating a growing professionalmanagerial class, who required specialized writing skills required for their jobs (Shumway 1994, 101). Between 1900 and 1925, and concomitant with this utilitarian trend, was the growing instruction of creative writing, which focused on selfexpression rather than journalistic skills (Myers 1996, 61). Such creative writing courses were available in the classroom, correspondence courses, and by selftaught instruction; the rise of the magazine industry at the time encouraged many to imagine themselves as potential contributors if they could master a shortstory formula (Myer 1996, 67-68). Thus, like the dryas dust formulas of the philologists, the creative writing books and courses had their own howto idiom describing the winning techniques required for publication (Myers 1996, 69). [3.4] In 1922, Cather experimented with creative writing instruction at the three week Bread Loaf Summer Writer's Conference. Though her letters indicate that "People at Bread Loaf were very friendly" and that she "enjoyed her three weeks at Bread Loaf," she refused invitations for a second visit for the rest of her career (Stout 2007, 93). Creative writing instruction, which treated writing as a quickly learned practice, contradicted Cather's idea of slowly developing an individual's inherent artistry.
Nonetheless, some readers wrote to Cather asking for writing advice, a request she found annoying. She wrote succinctly to Henry Chester Tracy in 1922 that she could not "give him any advice on how to write a story except to wait until he feels compelled by his material" (Jewell and Stout 2007, 0606). In 1934, likely after many more such requests, she replied irritably that she was "Too tired of answering questions from men writing books on creative writing to answer his. Silly to try to teach it anyway. People should be taught to write clear, correct English and let creative writing take care of itself" (Jewell andStout 2007, 1243). The movement toward creative writing instruction was the latest iteration of such taxing requests. As managing editor for McClure's from 1906 to 1911, Cather also had reviewed poorly written manuscript submissions and answered inquiries for writing advice, tasks she found enervating (note 4). When corresponding with her own readers, she continued to avoid letters that echoed the magazine grind and threatened to slip into the public sphere via textbooks or other forms of circulated advice (Woodress 1987, 203). Cather evaded both the academic asking her to interpret her own work and the composition teacher, student, or aspirant asking her to explain her own techniques.
[3.5] By the 1920s, Cather's career was no longer boosted by reviewers as an excellent example of local color writing. Concomitant with the concern of technique in creative writing was the call among literary reviewers for technical experimentation (Acocella 2000, 22). Cather refuted such priorities in a speech given at Bowdoin College in 1925: "There is much talk in the critical magazines and in colleges about the technique of the novel. I never hear the talk among writers. Sometimes I think it is something the critics invented for the sake of argument" (Cather 1986b, 155). Within the fan letters, a space outside colleges and magazines, this concern for technique is secondary. For example, Stanley Weiser wrote in 1926, "There is no one whose technique I admire more, Miss Cather [than yours,] but to feel that technique is of more worth than Claude is to feel that theology is greater than God" (Southwick Collection). When fans acknowledge that her expressive ability exceeds their own, they may offer Cather sense of security for her own position as author at a time when competition among publishing authors was growing. I imagine one of the most satisfying letters in light of this concern must have been that of Calvin Lewis convenience to be bought and thrown away at the end of a journey" (Cather 1989, 155). Cather's deep involvement in the production of her books demonstrates their importance to her as objects and the ways she attempted to orchestrate readers' relationships with the text through its physical features. She selected not only illustrations and cover design but also the finer details such as page format, paper quality, and ink color; she believed that the form of the book should correspond to its mood and thus she directed its creation accordingly (Rosowski 1992, ix advertisements to exude sincere enthusiasm and excitement" rather than "impressive formality…She believed a reviewer's enthusiastic tone was more important and influential than words of commendation"; Alfred Knopf's business style, which focused on expressing his own admiration for an author and maintaining a personalized and longterm relationship with those he represented, appealed to values that also fueled Cather's fan letter relationships (Hamilton 2007, 14). Knopf's book advertisement offers another example of a professional using the rhetoric of fan letters as a means of promoting an author ( figure 4). Cather preferred a fannish editorial voice, suggesting an overlap rather than a strict dichotomy between the two groups. Hamilton notes that some of Knopf's advertisements look "like personal letters to a friend complete with paragraphs and his signature in script" (2007,14). I would suggest that they look like fan letters-addressed to Cather  Cather wrote to Carlton Wells, a professor at the Department of English at the University of Michigan: "No, can't allow him to publish quotations from her earlier letter. Assumed the writer of such an intelligent letter as the one he wrote would know better than to try to use it for publicity. P.S.: Had not realized she was writing to an English teacher who meant to read her letter to his class. Is usually cautious, but apparently not cautious enough" (Jewell andStout 2007, 1294). [4.13] We might see fan letters, then, as a wellsuited (though not always perfect) venue for Cather's attempts to maintain the boundary between artist and promoter.
Fan letter correspondence diffused many of the troubling aspects of selfpromotion.
When fans write, usually the readers' purchase of and connection with the work is already complete. The bounds of privacy assumed (but not always realized) in epistolary exchange allowed her to continue to court readers' goodwill as well as agree or disagree with their interpretations. If Cather was only moderately successful at shaping the prereading of her professional readers, fan mail shows that she continued shaping an individual's reading and interpretation after the initial act of reading, whether that reader was a professional or common reader. Moreover, if the latest trend among Cather scholars uses archival material to uncover the degree to which Cather crafted her public, authorial persona, then it seems only fitting that the same archive would show that she imagined an ideal reader and maintained a personal collection of letters that reflected an idealized readerauthor relationship.
[4.14] Cather applied to herself the same reading standards she had for her audience, as exemplified by one of the few personal editions from her private library.
Charles Mignon offers a close reading of her copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop, which he describes as a "personal scrapbook" (1999, 172). After carefully directing the printing and illustrative features of this 1930 English edition, Cather treated it with the kind of devoted readerly usage that fans of the archive also describe. Indeed, a fan letter pasted onto the back of the book indicates the value Cather placed on this copy as well as correspondence with her readers. The letter from Agnes Thompson, dated 1928, begins with a rhetorical gesture common to such letters, which often assert that the value of the book exceeds its market price: "Death Came [sic] for the Archbishop has given me such great pleasure that I should like to make a return more personal than the royalty on my copy." As a gift, the letter enclosed a picture of Kit Carson, who appears as a character in the novel. Also in this copy, Cather adds pictures of herself on horseback in the southwest, leading Mignon to conclude, "she has placed herself imaginatively in the scene…an outward sign of her spiritual kinship" with the main character, Father Latour (174). Thus the proximity tightens between author and reader as well as fictional and historical persons as they become incorporated into the same bound object and imagined landscape. Cather's personal copy emphasizes repeated reading, a personal connection to a text, and travel based on the text. [4.15] A wellloved book stands as an alternative to professional reading. Fan letters might well have been a refuge from professional methods of reading, if not from professionals themselves, since they occasionally switch readerly methods. Fan letters illustrate the circulation and appreciation of her work; they also offer a continuation of her narratives by adding their work to hers. These fan letters reveal that throughout her career, Cather was interested in the reception of her work not only in published reviews but also by her readers in the broadest sense. Her replies to fans praised their sensitive, emotional readings, and engaged them in descriptions of their own experience while ignoring comments about professional criticism. In contrast with reviews, which usually only appear directly after publication, these fan letters allowed Cather to confirm that her texts were considered and reconsidered well after the initial response that appeared in print. In these letters, we see professionals recognizing, using, and appreciating fan letter rhetoric. We also find an author's appreciation for commonreader approaches to her work. The very structure of this journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, proposes to be a place where academics and fan communities can speak to each other, share or swap subject positions, and "come together" (TWC Editor 2008). Just as this journal is one platform for such mixed interaction, we see in the fan letters that this notsonew interaction can appear in other fancentric mediums as well. Reproduction of the Langston Hughes letter is also with permission from Harold Ober Associates, with special thanks to Craig Tenney for his assistance. Cather (1984) includes critical reviews from her life as well as an introduction to scholarly trends. Conversely, we might follow the lead of biographer James Woodress, who, among others, acknowledged that the general reading public kept Cather afloat and in print while she suffered various valuations by reviewers and critics (1980,334).

Acknowledgments
I acknowledge that later in Cather's career the reviews tended to be less appreciative, but my main argument uses the fan letters to demonstrate that the boundaries between the two groups are less rigid than previously depicted.

Cather taught English as a high school teacher from 1901 to 1906 while living in
Pittsburgh. She distinguished between teaching students how to write clearly and creating room for students to become writers on their own. In a 1925 interview, Cather asserted, "Without a doubt the schools develop good mechanical writers, and if a born artist happens to take the course it won't do him any harm. In my opinion, you can't kill an artist any more than you can make one" (Bohlke 77-78).
4. Working for McClure also exposed her to some of the pleasures of fan letters. In 1914 she was the ghostwriter for his autobiography, which concluded with a selection of fan letters sent during its serial appearance. Cather subsequently incorporated some of them when she revised the magazine pieces into a book. Many of the letters exhibit the values of Cather's own fan letter collection-evaluating the success of the story based on personal experience or emotional resonance, for example. Additionally, the autobiography exhibits how the seemingly private genre of fan letters can easily slip into the public realm, thereby popularizing both the impulse to write and the rhetorical patterns used to give that urge expression.

Praxis
"White shoes to a football match!": Female experiences of football's golden age in England Stacey Pope

Department of PE and Sports Studies, University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, United Kingdom
John Williams

Department of Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom
[0.1] Abstract-Although many British historians claim that English football in the post-World War II period was substantially the passion of workingclass men, oral history accounts also reveal a largely hidden history of active female sports fans, women who keenly followed football. These female fans often faced opposition from fellow supporters and from other women. In many ways, academic research on sports fandom has worked to omit serious discussion of the role of women. Taken from a wider project aimed at making more visible the historical experiences of female spectators in sport in Britain, this paper draws on interviews with 16 older female fans of the Leicester City football club based in the East Midlands in England. It explores their experiences in the socalled golden age of the game with regard to the football stadium, styles of female support, and relationships with and perceptions of football players. Via oral history research, the paper offers a wider context for understanding the sporting experiences of female fans. But it also analyzes and explicates the meaning of sport in the lives of female fans during a period when football players were paradoxically glamorous and unobtainable local figures, but also, in some contexts, still accessible, ordinary members of local communities.
[    and thereby gain a perspective on workingclass culture and social relationships that could not be acquired by studying dominant national forms of sport." Thus, in the 1980s, some historians began to rethink their work on British sport, especially in relation to issues of social class. Indeed, Hill (1996) argued that important contributions from scholars such as Holt (1986), Jones (1986,1988), and Taylor (1987) were actually written from a class perspective. But gender issues remained largely marginalized because many historians presented a "male version of history" (Hill 1996, 12). Oral history accounts of sports fandom in England often excluded or invisibilized women. Football historians have certainly tended to assume that accounts      in the second tier of English football, but the club routinely attracted more than 20,000 spectators to home games (note 3).

Context and methodology
[3.7] The recorded interviews typically lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours, although some went on for up to 4 hours. They were usually conducted in the homes or the workplaces of our respondents. All were conducted by the female researcher and coauthor of this paper (also a Leicester City fan), who was occasionally challenged in her work by male (usually husband) intrusions or other forms of male "policing" of female research (Deem 1986). This is a further indicator, of course, of the highly marginal role still allocated by some men to some women in the latter's role as sports spectators (Pope 2008). Thus, our findings draw on oral history accounts that explore women's experiences of the socalled golden age of English football in the 1950s and early 1960s. Because of space constraints, we explore just three main themes: English football and a sense of safety; styles of female fan support; and women's relationships with football players.

4.
English football and a sense of well-being: "It was safe" female football fans describe their relative lack of fear of attending during this period, with some attributing this, on reflection, either to youthful indifference to potential danger-"When you're young, you don't care"-or the idea that any risks involved were acceptable-"All part of the afternoon, the entertainment" (F45, F47). If women (or other fans) ever needed assistance at football matches during this period, they were also protected by the muchmythologized and eponymous postwar British bobby (police officer):  [4.3] This is an idealized picture, of course. But the police presence at football matches-or the relative lack of it-only served to reinforce the notion that, in the main, 1950s English football grounds were regarded as safe spaces for both men and women. For example, F43 remembers the "good times" of attending matches in the years from 1949 with a certain nostalgia when the "policeman would take off his helmet, so you could see [the match]." This is perhaps an especially powerful image, strongly signifying the prehooligan period of relative crowd harmony-though other accounts clearly suggest that male supporter violence was already a subterranean feature of postwar English football culture (Williams 2010).
[4.4] A range of positive terms or phrases were used by female fans to describe their early football experiences, implicitly making comparisons with a more fractious, less tolerant, present: a "friendly atmosphere"; "You never saw any trouble" or heard "bad language"; one never felt "scared," "intimidated," or "afraid" (F40, F43, F45, F46, F47, class solidarity seemed more important and more stable in these periods than they are today. Respondents in our own research seem to share similar ideas about supposed greater communal trust in others, a point perhaps best illustrated when F47 described how large numbers of football supporters were happy to pay local residents threepence to look after their bikes while they watched the match. [4.7] This was also a period when generational relationships in public are remembered as being experienced rather differently than they are today. A number of respondents, for example, described how they witnessed children being passed down to the front of large football crowds in the early 1950s, over the heads of other crowd members-or how they experienced this themselves (F32, F40, F43, F46, F47, F51). There was little apparent fear that children might be abused, crushed, or lost in these potentially chaotic public contexts. There seems to have been relatively little public concern or panic expressed about relations between children and stranger adults in sports crowds. As F43 recalls:  [4.11] As well as the term "electric" used here, descriptions such as "buoyed up," "elated," "enjoyable," and "excited" were generally used to describe the tightly packed postwar audiences that, like great creatures, were often remembered as surging forward with the crowd swaying (F45, F47, F49, F51). This sociability and easy familiarity inside football crowds operated across the sexes. One of Watt's (1993, 275) male interviewees described, for example, how male fans at Arsenal used to warm their hands under the arms of unfamiliar females, with no objections. The sense that there was rather more sexual innocence and more mutual trust between the sexes at postwar football was also touched upon by our own respondents. Those older women who were terrace (standing) fans claim not to have been threatened at all by being stationed for hours on end, "body to body" (F50); instead, such corporeal proximity with men helped women keep warm (F47, F50). [4.12] Social class relations also shaped the football stadium crowd, of course. F50 recalled how, in this period, stadium seating was assumed to be for "the hierarchy"; only a relatively small part of the stadium capacity was made up of seats, and this was where the higher classes, club directors, and shareholders sat-the "posh people" (F47), in other words. Thus, perhaps a more strongly shared class identity added to this greater community spirit and a greater sense of common purpose and solidarity at the stadium, and indeed, to stronger feelings of collective solidarity in British society more generally.   [4.15] Other respondents who continued to attend during this period also recalled instances when they were fearful for their own safety. This fan violence would indeed represent the end for some of the modernist optimism and collective solidarities at sport of the golden age.
5. Styles of support: "Everybody was in tune" [5.1] Exactly how did women support their sports clubs during this period? Some sense of the carnivalesque and a rejection of the banality and anonymity of everyday life are clearly apparent. Turbin (2003,45) argues that dress is highly gendered and that clothing gives both shape and meaning to the bodies of men and women. Dress is inherently both public and private, as "an individual's outwardly presented signs of internal or private meaning are significant only when they are also social, that is comprehensible on some level to observers." Some of our respondents discussed their own match day football costumes, outfits they had made or purchased especially for this purpose. These seemed to be important for individual ( Figure 2 shows a cabinet at the home of one of our respondents. It contains football products, including a number of foxes (Leicester City's club logo and nickname). Many female fans had football photographs on the walls of their homes, including shots taken with players from previous decades. Some had also decorated parts of their homes in Leicester City blue. described how "tickets were few and far between" for FA Cup finals, but also noted that such matches engaged not only active football fans, but the city as a whole: 6. Women's relationships with football players: "They were just like one of us" [6.1] First team football players in England were lauded in the 1940s and 1950s, but they were also strongly located in the local community (Critcher 1979). They could be met by fans at the local food market, in shops, or at one's place of work; some women fans had relatives who were friends with players (F45, F50, F51). There was a strong sense that players were "Leicester people" who would typically walk to the home ground along with everyone else on a match day (F49). Terms such as "approachable," "closer," "one of us," and "ordinary guys" who lived in "ordinary houses" (F37, F40, F43, F46, F47) were frequently used when discussing players of this period. but because players mixed locally and were not earning wages that were notably superior to many other local people in professional jobs, they were socially and culturally located; they did not "think they were up on a pedestal like some [players] do now" (F37). Football players today were seen as being more "cut off" because they [6.5] Older female respondents fondly remember this era, partly because of the imagined greater sense of stability, but also because-perhaps less likely todayfootball was perceived to be an important local site for the expression of local belonging as well as national virtues. These were often defined, in part, by a sense of certainty about local traditions and place and cultural continuity: a social homogeneity and a common ethnicity. In today's more global game, Leicester City, like most English football clubs, recruits players from around the world. This new direction for football was rather more difficult for some respondents to identify with and accept: 7. Some conclusions [7.1] The recollections and views expressed above are, of course, partly couched in nostalgic reflection, and sometimes dimmed by memory. Social and economic change -the impact of globalization-is difficult to accept, perhaps especially as one gets older and, arguably, more conservative. Were all football players in England of the 1950s really "class located" and as committed to their clubs and local supporters as is suggested here? Do all foreign players today lack the commitment that is somehow deemed as being more inherent in locals? This seems doubtful. But these comments, we assert, reveal wider discomforts and anxieties about the neoliberal sports and economic order of today-about the perceived "chaos of reward" of Jock Young's (1999) disorienting latemodern world. Here, the widely held perception seems to be that society today is less obviously fair and meritocratic, and that showing loyalty and working hard-in any sport, business, or company-is no longer a guarantee of just rewards and opportunities as perhaps it once was. Players of this golden era of football are thus idealized for their supposed love of the game, and for their more visceral connections with a people and an occupation that was "their hobby, as well as their sport and their profession" (F49). centuries with a sense of release, belonging, and solidarity. The capacity to work hard, take punishment, and play your role in the team-all features of manual work-were the qualities the workingclass male sports crowd most admired.
[7.3] Thus, the male working classes in England identified strongly with football because it seemed to reflect a workingclass experience back to them. The division of labor within a team could be compared to the "specialization of skills that went into the production of iron and steel or, perhaps more appropriately, the manufacturing of machinery" (Holt 1992, 162-63). Our own interviewees-like those of Phelps (2001)also confirm that the key qualities admired in players of this period included a sense of fair play and a gentlemen's reputation for being reserved; for showing courage, and exhibiting heroic forms of traditional workingclass loyalty and toughness. Thus, it seems that female fans also identified strongly with traits more typically associated with English identity and masculinity. While some of our female fans recalled identifying strongly with individual players, there was little room in supporters' affections-male or female-for fancy Dans or faint hearts. In many ways, such sentiments endure in England today.
[7.4] In more recent times, it can be contested that women have a slightly more respected role as fans in the game. It has been suggested that football fandom in England (following the changes in the sport after 1989) has become more "feminized"  2001b). Yet rather than offering a serious discussion of women as knowledgeable, committed fans, the research focus in football often remains on women in subordinate or sexualized roles or both. For writers such as Clayton and Harris (2004), this might be seen as an encouraging sign of the postmodern era in the sense that women are visible at all in the sporting culture, but there is clearly a long way to go if women's role in football, as fans, players, administrators, officials, and so on, is to be taken seriously.
[7.5] Our findings here offer but a brief historical snapshot of women's experiences of English football's golden age. We have concentrated on their perceptions of football crowds, on styles of female support, on local identities framed through sport, and on their relations with, and perceptions of, football players from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. We contend that women fans have been largely ignored by male sociologists and historians in their accounts of the cultural and social significance and meaning of football. The oral history research presented here can make some claims to try to "retrieve" the experiences of women fans in this context and to explore, in some greater depth, the various ways in which women once connected with the sport in both its production and consumption. This was before wider social changes from the late 1960s onward-including male fan hooliganism-began to offer new challenges to the role of women as active fans at English football matches. star while Vincent's career had been derailed by alcoholism and changing tastes. The caption "Autograph Hound" comments on this improbable role reversal, and it also does something else: it celebrates the role of music fans by pointing out that even a leader of the world's most popular band was once just another giddy admirer angling to get close to his own idol. The message is profoundly egalitarian: fans and musicians appear as equally important members of the scene around Beat music, as rock and roll was rechristened in 1960s Europe. "twens" (people in their 20s) in many classes, regions, and countries used these spaces free of parental supervision to create moments of utopia that offered respiteeven if only temporarily-from the postwar era's stifling sexual conservatism and social conformism (Herzog 2005, 101-28). Their voices also emerged through Germany's first rock magazine, the StarClub News. The Star Club's proprietor became an ally of the fans who made up this musical "nation," keeping prices low so that they could afford to come daily-and hundreds did, forming networks that still exist today.

Acknowledgment
While these fans were not formally organized or overtly oppositional-and hence did not constitute a subculture, as the term has come to be used-the ways they deployed musical and material objects, as well as the ways they asserted their right to public space, made them important agents in West Germany's transition to a more open, democratic society in the 1960s.
2. "Take a seat or piss off!" Experiencing rock and roll in Hamburg Those with talent formed serious bands that needed places to play, which were in short supply in Britain. Enter Hamburg, a bustling port with longstanding connections to Britain and a booming entertainment economy constantly seeking fresh talent.   (Mutsaers 1990). These "Indorockers" were soon replaced by acts from England that, as Ulf Krüger, a chronicler of the Hamburg scene, put it, were "cheaper, rawer, and wilder" (Articus 1996, 19). Cheap, raw, and wild fit perfectly with the ethos of the Reeperbahn itself.  [2.6] Koschmider was instrumental in launching a trend, but to him the musicians and the music itself were disposable. It was the fans who created a scene, a community brought together by shared tastes, styles, and notions of authenticity (Cohen 1999    [3.2] These fans fashioned themselves as texts through the ways they moved and dressed, with teasedup hairdos or rocker jackets signifying their allegiances. Such activities eroded clearcut distinctions between artist and audience while asserting "outsiderness" in a society that prized conformism. They also asserted that cultural power was a democratic right available to all who wished to claim it (Fiske 1989, 147-48). I use the term democratic cautiously, but deliberately: cautiously, because it conjures up notions of formal organization or conscious opposition to prevailing economic and political structures, which do not apply here. The scene articulated no desire to stand the outside world on its head-rebellion was temporally and spatially contained. Gender stereotypes, for example, remained largely intact: while fans of both sexes revealed in interviews that they were sexually active, women were more monogamous and their sexual pleasure was an afterthought to their partners (according to Ruth Lallemand and Rosi Sheridan McGinnity, with whom I spoke in 2010). Homosexuals were tolerated but vulnerable to ridicule. Most of the first generation Beat fans-and practically all of the female fans-would leave the scene and "settle down" into work and family life after the mid1960s (even as they continued to follow their favorite bands whenever they could, up through the present day). Yet these fans' modes of consumption were a democratizing force in that they illustrated "a mode of radical democratization that put pursuit of pleasure at the heart of citizenship" (Chaney 2002, 145), especially if we accept a definition of citizenship that encompasses the right to speak or to gather in public spaces (as will be seen below in the protests over the Star Club's 1964 closure) (Canclini 2001, 15). This mode of consumption also advanced Germany's opening to the West, with English serving as both a sign of musical authenticity and a marker of identity among fans of all social classes who incorporated fragments of it into their daily speech (a gesture that made particular sense in Anglophilic Hamburg). English was also the language of the black American musicians fans revered: embracing it-and rock and roll in general -allowed these young Germans to distance themselves emotionally and politically from the "old Nazis" who had once banned swing and now demonized rock (Fascher 2006, 65).  [3.4] But was Hamburg's Beat music scene an oppositional social force? It was, after all, commercially driven. Theodore Adorno dismissed Beat as a "machinemade product" of a "dirigistic mass culture"; even more sympathetic critics tend to view rock and roll after 1958 as less "authentic" because of its commercialization (Baacke 1968, 45-49). Most fans combined participation in the scene, a leisure activity, with the requirements of school or work, and many reject the notion that they were acting in any consciously political way. Voormann, for example, acknowledges that his clique's style was nonconformist but adds, "politically we were completely passive" (Voormann 2002, 34). An alternative view, however, is held by the sociologist Dieter Baacke, who in 1968 characterized Beat as "the silent opposition." Beat's potency lay not in any directly articulated political critique-Baacke distinguishes Beat fans from politically organized youth-but in the way it offered opportunities for leisure completely emancipated from the world of work. Beat adherents critiqued society by distancing themselves from it through shared signs and symbols (the "silent" aspect). Fans sought-and found-a sense of individual identity and recognition denied them at school and the workplace. Beat clubs simultaneously became places of group solidarity, a solidarity that led some to take on a more active political role. Michael "Bommi" Baumann wrote that Beat clubs (in his case in West Berlin) brought together youths who shared their frustrations and forged a consensus that "everything against the current order" and its "petit bourgeois mediocrity" was good (1998, 22-23).

Music fans and social change in West Germany
Baumann soon moved into radical leftist politics as a founder of the Second of June (1967) Movement and the Commune II (Kommune II). Günter Zint, a photographer, leftist activist, and son of a former Nazi party member, came from a "good bourgeois home" where authority was never questioned or political engagement encouraged. The Star Club, he says, was "the first place I experienced Widerspruch"-literally, "talking back." He states unequivocally that Beat music prepared the ground for the student movement and "1968" (ByeBye StarClub 1987) [3.5] Beat also acquired an oppositional character when adults castigated it as a sign of cultural decline. It certainly appeared socially disruptive to Hamburg authorities, who closely monitored the "Beat shacks" starting in 1961. Youth Protection Squads-a joint effort of police and welfare authorities-conducted undercover visits, searching for underage patrons and curfew violators. Their reports reveal that concomitant with their mandate to protect youth was a view of it as a social threat, a view that gained currency during rock and roll's early phase. The squads monitored issues such as underage drinking and "obscene" records in jukeboxes, but their most recurring concern was teenage sexual activity. They wrote up the Hit Club, for example, for having a condom dispenser in the men's bathroom. Young women were thought to be in particular moral danger, as the clubs were depicted as havens for runaways and "wayward" girls who were either working in the local sex industry or heading down that road. This concern with sex appears as part of the greater issue of discipline and social control (note 6). Youths were coming to St. Pauli in growing numbers without adult supervision, lured by a culture of music and pleasure so powerful that some were running away from "good homes" in Hannover, Munich, and even Scandinavia to experience it. Freiheit. Asserting their right to cultural space, one group of female demonstrators brandished pacifiers to illustrate their contention that they were being treated like children with no right to speak. It's unclear whether these protests convinced the city to reconsider-more likely, the negative economic impact of the club's closure at the height of Beat's popularity compelled authorities to work out a deal. By late June Weissleder had transferred the club's license to one of his managers and the club had been allowed to reopen (Weissleder was also officially banned from the premises, but nonetheless retained effective control over operations). Still, the fight over the Beat scene's right to exist was far from over (note 7).

The StarClub News:
A voice for fans [4.1] The same year that Falck tried unsuccessfully to close the Star Club, Weissleder began publishing the first German magazine devoted to rock music, the StarClub News. This was Germany's first pop music publication to bear the direct imprint of fans. Indeed, the News offered new languages with which to conceptualize the identity of the generation born in the 1940s. The magazine also took a leading role in constructing youth as a consumer market while simultaneously critiquing the commercialization of youth culture in mainstream media. Through articles on music and other topics, as well as its very style, it questioned prevailing notions of respectability, identity, authority, authenticity, and even citizenship, and the everyday meanings of democracy.  publications about pop music. On the one hand there was twen, a stylish monthly aimed at 20somethings, known for its art photography and progressive tone on issues such as sex, race, and the Nazi past (Koetzle 1997). Its music coverage was driven by editor Joachim Berendt, an influential advocate for what he deemed "authentic" music, from Miles Davis to Delta blues (Hurley 2009). Berendt's tastes, coupled with twen's bias toward a more upscale and slightly older readership, meant an aversion to rock and roll, which it portrayed as an "inauthentic" commercial genre associated with a pimply proletarianism. For example, twen's first piece on the Beatles, in May 1964, offered a bemused look at their "hysterical" fans, while their music was assumed to be disposable; one reader subsequently griped that he didn't need twen to inform him that the Beatles were "coarse and loud" (note 8). Twen did not belong to rock and Beat fans. employ the demeaning language of the tabloids or the boulevard press, which at times deployed terms reminiscent of Naziera rants against "degenerate music," Bravo covered Beat in articles written by reporters who seemed old enough to be Ringo's dad, and who used a breathless, silly style designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience (figure 6, note 10).  Its subtitle, "Information Report for Young People," reveals an intention to report seriously on what was still widely considered a trivial subject. Weissleder and his staff commented in every issue on the insipidness and dishonesty of German music journalism (no pieces were signed, but my sources agree that Weissleder wrote nearly everything [note 11]). As one piece put it, "The reader has a right to be correctly informed and, even in the domain of the lesser muses, not to be taken for an idiot" (note 12). journalists and young photographers (such as Günter Zint). Readers, whose letters appeared in great numbers in each issue, appear as coconspirators in a project to create something more than a mere teenybopper rag. As Weissleder wrote, "Our young readers are not unworldly, pampered hothouse flowers. They're intelligent, modern, realistic. We reject the stupid, illiterate style that the mainstream press thinks one has to use to address young people" (note 13).   [4.11] Ultimately, according to the News, respectability resided less in forms of address than in intelligence and achievement. In its role as an advocate for fans and bands, the News often criticized inept authorities and established institutions. One piece dubbed the West German music industry a greedy horde that would rather put out novelty records than promote "real talent." Grubby promoters, many of whom were just yesterday "vegetable handlers and coalFritzes," reaped a "golden rain" of riches, of which the bands saw little (Weissleder, in contrast, was universally characterized by musicians as a demanding but generous employer). The music press was complicit in this swindle, and the News ran a series exposing the corrupt system through which industry publications rigged the music charts. The News called for a "record parliament" that would accurately reflect the tastes of record buyers-a bid for legitimacy for both the News and for fans, whose interests were not being served by an outoftouch music press. The music press was also skewered for its retrograde notions of gender in a piece on the allfemale Liverbirds. It showed the band laughing at an issue of Musikparade that assured readers that they were in fact female: "skeptics have asked whether the Liverbirds were real girls because they just couldn't believe the weaker sex was capable of hammering out such a great beat" (note 16). In this and other ways, the News set itself up as a hipper, more democratic publication for a knowing audience.
[4.12] "Knowingness" (Bailey 1994) also marked the News's take on the mainstream press as a whole, which it pilloried for its sensationalism and "glaring lack of expertise" in its rush to "get a lick from the honey pot" of the Beat craze (note 17). The Springer Press-publisher of the masscirculation rightwing tabloid Bild-earned sustained reproach for its daily menu of horror stories and negative portrayals of youth. The News's gallery of rogues also included Kurt Falck, a standin for all those "guardians of youth" who in fact demonized youth:    active role in this scene was a crucial element in the larger transition away from a youth culture defined by adults and designed to protect youth from "smut" and "moral dangers" to a new culture, generated by youth for youth, that strove to be something more than just disposable entertainment.

Praxis
"So oft to the movies they've been": British fan writing and female audiences in the silent cinema Lisa Rose Stead

University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom
[0.1] Abstract-This article aims to address the ways in which workingclass and lowermiddleclass British women used silentera fan magazines as a space for articulating their role within the development of a female film culture. The article focuses on letter pages that formed a key site for female contribution to British fan magazines across the silent era. In contributing to these pages, women found a space to debate and discuss the appeal and significance of particular female representations within film culture. Using detailed archival research tracing the content of a specific magazine, Picturegoer, across a 15year period (1913-28), the article will show the dominance of particular types of female representation in both fan and "official" magazine discourses, analyzing the ways in which British women used these images to work through national tensions regarding modern femininity and traditional ideas of female propriety and restraint. [1.2] The affirmation of cinema as a topic worthy of written debate engaged notions of high and lowbrow cultural divisions in the early 20th century and the place of cinema within this divide. Fan theory has analyzed the deconstruction of this high/low binary of cultural forms in fan activity, which proceeds by "treating popular texts as if they merited the same degree of attention and appreciation as canonical texts" (Jenkins 1992, 17). Breaking with approaches to fandom that have sought to society" while also being "implicated in these very economic and cultural processes" (2002,29). Hills suggests that the status of fans as "ideal consumers" who at the same time "express anticommercial beliefs" constitutes a necessarily irresolvable contradiction that needs to be "tolerated" by the researcher, rather than subsumed under a banner of totalizing resistance to commercial discourses (2002, 29).  [2.7] It made economic sense, therefore, for the creators of fan magazines to similarly cultivate a female readership. In doing so, fan magazines paralleled women's magazines and the women's pages of daily newspapers in targeting a female audience as the figures of financial control over leisure and consumption within the family unit.

Cinema and women's popular press in early 20th-century Britain
As LeMahieu assesses, "it was women who shopped for food, bought clothes, paid the rent, and made the daily financial decisions" (1988,33). Newspapers and advertising became firmly linked as a way of targeting female readers in the recognition of this female control over disposable income. Fan magazines similarly attempted to strike a balance between original content and advertising space.    Picturegoer created a primary position for itself at the heart of cinema culture in this way.    articles. Yet while bestowing apparent selfdefinition with one hand, the magazine paralleled its advertising in efforts to reinforce the temporary nature of such discourses with the other, affirming a heterosexual domestic focus within much of its sustained writing about the private lives of female stars. [4.5] A regular crop of "star home life" articles praising the domesticity of female stars appeared across the decade. Interviews with the stunt star Ruth Roland, for example, while acknowledging her abilities in boxing, riding, shooting, and fencing, stressed that the title "homebody Ruth" (January 1921, 34) was much closer to her real personality. Articles offset her "masculinity" against the more feminized image of a "pretty, dainty, and winsome" (February 1918, 173) star who professed to "love cooking" (June 1921, 43) and represented "as much of a homegirl as the most old fashioned of our grandparents could desire" (June 1921, 43).  week. Their voices break when they try to speak of the ravishing gowns they hate to wear…and how they loathe the horrid glare publicity forces them to bear! They'd love to live in a small back street and have to fight to make ends meet; they'd sooner wear a gingham frock than queen it in a "Paris shock." Where did they learn this courage pray, that hides their heartache day by day, at having to drive in imported cars and live in mansions (poor little stars!) when all the time they long and pine for floors to scrub and wool to twine…Perhaps some day a kinder Fate-will let some sweet star clean my grate, at six in the morning-and light the fire…then, then she will gain her life's desire! (January 1926, 66)

Writing back
[5.4] Irene's letter foregrounds a central irritation with the hypocritical presentation of film stars who profess to detest their material wealth and success. The interviewers she discusses are able to list and thereby emphasize the various examples of star prosperity and luxury-"ravishing gowns," "Paris shocks," "imported cars," "mansions," and so on-while framing them as points of burden in the lives of female stars, depicting screen personalities as reluctant consumers.
[5.5] Irene taps into the double bind whereby the representation of women as pure consumers was encouraged within commercial products like the fan magazine (in order to ensure continued purchase) while at the same time framed with disapproval where such pure consumption endangered notions of appropriate female modesty. As Sue Bruley has shown, in the postwar era it was "single women who were especially vilified in the media as being useless members of society," while "married women workers were not tolerated" (1999,62). The female star as independently successful working woman, therefore-single or married and on constant display as an object of consumer desire-directly provoked these attitudes. [5.7] Stacey argues that cinema "shaped consumer habits" by aligning itself with consumer culture developments through "the display of the female star as commodity" (1994,180). She emphasizes the strong parallels between "goods and stars…on display to spectators as desirable spectacles" (1994, 179). [5.14] The attempts of the industry to appeal to workingclass values was not always a point of irritation, however. Some female fans applauded the filmic representation of the modern female experiences of laboring women. One fan identifying herself as a working girl, for example, praises the presentation of female experience in a Pauline Frederick film amid an audience of "women, experienced in the drama of life, who closely follow the great actress as she works out a problem or question of today" (March 1918, 283). [5.15] Women across the spectrum of workingclass and lowermiddleclass British femininity, therefore, used the letters page to debate both the appeal and the problems of points of identification between female audiences and female stars within a network of film texts, magazine representation, and personal experience.
6. Fan community [6.1] As the letter from 1923 demonstrates in its discussion of the "us" and "we" of the female audience, fan participation allowed readers to independently reach out to other women for their thoughts and opinions on these kinds of issues. 3] Another reader similarly asserts she is "NOT a 'fan,' but keenly critical" (July 1926, 66); another, on discussing Rudolph Valentino, says, "I am no silly flapper" (February 1923, 66). Fan poetry also often mocked the image of the fan as one whose "critical sense / comes lagging behind!" (March 1925, 64).
[6.4] Rather than simply writing "carols and mush / To the stars that they worship" (October 1924, 50), therefore, women used the letters page to discuss their understanding of the cinema as an industry as well as a leisuretime experience. Some female contributors debated such subjects as the problems facing British film production, particularly in relation to its seeming inability to create successful internationally appealing female stars. Others railed against the lack of sophistication of films for women in general, reacting negatively to objectified feminine images in favor of more plotheavy pictures, since, as one fan explains, "in nine out of ten pictures the story is absolutely nothing; all one sees is a set of photographic poses" (June 1924, 66).
[6.5] There was considerable disagreement among fans over what exactly it was "the public really wanted" (May 1920, 568). Some called for greater realism in the cinema with films "which deal frankly and truthfully with life" (March 1918, 282), while some wanted the screen to present purely escapist fantasies enabling the viewer to be "carried away from this workaday world and its troubles" (September 1923, 66).
Women were united in these debates, nonetheless, in the general assertion that the industry's conception of the ways in which women identified with cinematic female representations was out of step with actual female audiences. Fan letters often called upon the collective influence of fans in an attempt to reconcile their preferences with the types of films produced and exhibited by the industry and the quality of the cinemagoing experience. within the cinema venue itself may have been difficult to disentangle from such encounters, or from the exposure to a male audience "just above the breadline" (Dewes 1983, 18), who used film theaters as an escape from the cold and a cheap refuge from the street.  attracted "whole families of industrial classes" (Calvert 1911, 4), and as such may have often denied women independent escapism from familial and domestic interaction.  for coverage of the stars whose movies they were promoting) and external companies, whose noncinemarelated advertising littered the pages of fan publications. to represent stereotypical twenties types, such as the flappers Clara Bow (Orgeron 2003) and Colleen Moore (Landay 2002; Hastie 2007) and the vamp Pola Negri (Negra 2002; Butler 2002. The critical use of these particular personalities has often been based on their popularity with American audiences, however.

Virtual community
[8. 5] In an attempt to approach a fuller understanding of British fans' interaction with female star images, therefore, an initial step has been to record and tally the appearance of individual female actresses in Picturegoer across the period under study (1913 to 1928), marking where they feature in pictorial forms (posters, photographs, covers, advertisements) and written forms (interviews, articles, features written by the stars themselves, competitions, fan letters, and poetry). The aim here is to establish a more relevant groundwork upon which to explore the range of feminine types circulating in fan discourse to which British women would have been most exposed and most prone to respond (note 8). [8.8] American actresses, therefore, dominated British female fan experience.
Industrially, there are several factors that justify this conclusion, such as the perceived failure of the British industry to emulate American production values; the temporary shutdown of all British production in 1924; and American blockbooking tactics forcing domestic production from the cinemas.
[8.9] A more detailed exploration of the fan discussion and treatment of the nationality of stars, however, reveals that the British female appreciation for and interaction with American star images was complex. Fan interaction was not simply a matter of embracing the imported personalities of an Americansaturated industry, but a relationship that engendered cultural tensions regarding models of female propriety and restraint.
[8.10] The conflict between traditional and new forms of femininity played out in many of the magazine's commercial discourses reverberates within fan discussion of female performances and personas. Stardom and the circulation of star images fed into the disruption of a traditional concept of a gendered public/private divide under threat in this period. The cinema as new public leisure form encouraged the consumption of public female images and the reciprocating display of the female body as an industry whose extratextual discourses relied heavily upon marketing the possibility of imitating star personas.
[8.11] The increasing grandeur of the public cinemagoing experience with the rise of the larger Picture Palaces in the teens also meant that cinemagoing itself was more than ever an opportunity for selfdisplay, fashion, and filmstar emulation. The fashiondominated pages of the fan magazine supported femaletargeted consumer discourses by encouraging fans to publicly flaunt "Mary Pickford curls" (July 1927, 60) and wear starendorsed cosmetics, promising "what it does for her it will do for you if you would be beautiful and admired" (July 1927, 60).
[8.12] Such activity posed a threat to traditional values dictating women's modesty and restricted urban mobility. The British woman as public spectacle and public consumer was therefore a figure whose precarious transition from private to public acutely played out in the cinematic environment, in which women encountered "idealised images of femininity on screen" (Stacey 1994, 183). [9.2] This "antistar inflection" is particularly evidenced in Picturegoer's conflicting presentation of stars as both consumers and nonconsumers, as echoed in the Irene example. The ease of class ascendance in the ragstoriches fairytale narratives of many American films, and the vast salaries of American stars with workingclass roots, painted a fantasy portrait of modern femininity that was a far cry from British women's everyday experiences of gender inequality and class division. Such films, as one fan puts it, depicted women who, "even when they have been brought up in the slums" could easily enter society by "putting on an evening dress" (August 1918, 211).
[9.3] Stardom for aspiring British girls was seemingly unattainable in light of the postwar backlash against working women, the British industry's reliance on theatrical performers with middleclass roots, and the more limited opportunities for the domestic promotion of national stars. Fans were thus wont to complain that "anyone with talent and grist has a far better chance of being recognised in America than is the case in England" (August 1918, 178); as a pair of female fans lament in 1919, "girls in America have more chances of becoming cinema actresses than we English girls" (November 1919, 111).
[9.4] Fan writing responded to these debates in the discussion of nationally specific forms of female representation on the screen, revealing conflicting efforts to reconcile notions of the appropriate behavior, appearance, and performance of female screen stars.   11. Performance style: "British reserve" versus "American enthusiasm" [11.1] Clothing debates tied into issues of national modes of performance. However progressive and modern they might have appeared, female stars were often chastised in fan writing for popularity founded entirely on glamour, wealth, and selfdisplay where it overshadowed acting talent. A letter from 1928, for example, complained:  1925,66) and take on less "artificial roles" (September 1925, 66). Gloria Swanson comes under fire continuously for her poor acting. As one fan complained, "the change is only in her gowns, she is the same, always" (September 1925, 66).

Costuming
[11.5] By privileging acting ability over aesthetic appearance, such letter writers posited performative skill as an essential element of an appealing female star. How women performed for the screen came in for just as much criticism and debate as how they dressed for the screen. A strong value placed on restraint as a discourse of performance-in terms of both performance style and costume style-was a concept that resonated within the British industry, and one that seemingly proved problematic for female stars like Taylor.
[11.6] Chrissie White, another Hepworth star, recalls, for example, how Hepworth "didn't like publicity-we [Hepworth's contract players] weren't allowed publicity at all" (Sweet 2006). Although Hepworth used studio magazines to promote his actresses and their films, none of them were allowed to give interviews or appearances early in their careers, again going against the grain of the American model of stardom more closely aligned with discourses of selfpromotion. [11.8] The restraint and reserve evidenced in Hepworth's approach to advertising was a quality deeply embedded both in the British dramatic tradition and as a wider social norm for British women in this period. Performative restraint, as Christine Gledhill has extensively discussed, is "rarely approved without its contrary, 'power' or 'passion'" in the tradition of British performance (2003, 62). Gledhill argues it is this logic of oppositional values that has long fueled complaints "about the repression of the English character, unable to express feeling" (2003, 63).
[11.9] British theatrical practices still held substantial cultural influence in the early 20th century as a site for "playing out the tensions in British culture between…private emotion and public presentation" (Gledhill 2003, 16), a tension which further placed emphasis upon issues of feminine decorum and selfdisplay. The cinematic reworking of this tradition in female film performance in particular brought the "playing out" of social tensions to the screen as a representation of, and catalyst for, women's increasing physical, social, and urban mobility and visibility. Yet what the cinema called for in acting style was in many ways fundamentally incompatible with the theatrical tradition. Cinema required a mode of performance that broke with the dramatic craft of theater acting in demanding a less mediated representational discourse, tied to the fundamental notion that film stars "did not really act but passively offered authentic ontological being to the recording apparatus" (Burrows 2001, 33).
[11.10] What was praised and revered on the stage, therefore-reserve, restraint, and representation, rather than simply being; as one fan puts it, screen stars need to "live, and not act it" (May 1928, 55)-translated awkwardly onto the screen and seemingly proved problematic issues for audiences in their experience of many British female star performances. [11.12] The following extract from a Picturegoer article late in 1928 entitled "Have We No 'It' Girls?" sides with the latter attitude: [11.13] The two-personality and reserve-cannot possibly go together for a girl who wants to succeed on the screen. On the stage reserve is an asset.
It lends dignity and stateliness. But dignity on the screen does not register as it does on the speaking stage. It makes a beautiful woman appear cold, haughty, unemotional. That is why most of our English screen actresses are often called "dumb." There is proof of this in the fact that Hollywood producers do not favour English girls in their productions…She looks hard and cold on the screen and, of course, that typical English reserve predominates. (December 1928, 39) [11.14] The British actress was, in the view of many fans, too often unable to navigate this incompatibility between modest British womanhood and the culture of personality that stardom embodied. The negotiation that American stars seemed to achieve appeared to hold greater appeal to British fans and may be one of the reasons for Mary Pickford being the most regularly discussed star within Picturegoer letters and poetry, along with the clear dominance of American stars featured in the fanwritten content of the magazine. [11.15] Although the innocence and charm of the Pickford persona played to more typically English norms, seemingly devoid of the aggressive and sexualized femininity of the more glamorous female stars, her star image overall fully embraced the self promotion and commodification of her persona. The ratio of images to written material within Picturegoer, for example, shows a substantial dominance of pictorial materialportraits, posters, covers-over articles and interviews with the star, while in terms of film performances the number of Pickford films produced in the period under study greatly outweighs those of leading British stars such as Betty Balfour (note 11).
[11.16] While fan writing retained a shrewd awareness of the constructed, fantastical nature of these prevalent star personas, therefore, the appealing fantasy of screen glamour and sophisticated screen performance style was positively upheld by American stars-some of whom, like Clara Bow, were themselves "picture girl" competition winners, and as such clearly marked as former fans.  7. The ability to threaten the industry with the public power to make or break a movie -a fan letter typical of many urges the "kinemagoer" to "wake up to the fact that they alone can operate the machinery which will bring us 'Better Pictures'" (May 1920, 568) -or to insist upon the production of particular types of films, may have less to do with a true desire for reform and more to do with the pleasurable act of voicing such assertions. However inconsequential such fan writing may ultimately have appeared to be, the powerful sensation of threatening the movie producer by setting pen to paper may have been an appealing notion to female viewers.

Conclusion
8. It is important to assert that the statistics drawn from this process give only a very general indication, as factors have to be taken into account concerning the availability of the magazine across the period. One or two individual issues and pages are missing from the collection; the results drawn reflect the most detailed compilation of the magazine available for research.

Burrows cites a report on Taylor's fashion habits in Nash's Pall Mall Magazine that
painted the star as a nonconsumer, reporting that "When Miss Taylor goes to London, which she does very infrequently, it is to do some simple shopping, for her wants are

Introduction
[1.1] As Scottish SF writer Ken MacLeod said, "history is the trade secret of science fiction." The two disciplines cross paths often and sometimes even seem to merge. In many people's lives the disposition to create community around historical interest or reenacted historical community practices, or even just entertainment in a mythic history setting, intersects with a related and similar interest in science fiction/fantasy literature and participation on some level in the related fandoms and social activities of SF/F. The bowlers, ballads, bells, and blasters of my title come together not just in current steampunk scenes but also in the storied and genred lives of many reenactors and fans. Or, as a friend of mine suggested when discussing this essay, "historical reenactment is the trade secret to fandom." [1.2] There are significant interactions and shared discourses between reenactors and fandom. I use the word reenactors to include not just the people who reenact battles, fur trade camps, or other historical events, but also Renaissance festival participants and traditional musicians and/or dancers. Reenactors and fans are not just focused on text or time periods. In thinking about the continuity of these groups we should not overlook their lived social and cultural relationships, both productive and reproductive. The intersections of these interests in the lives of many individuals, and the way these activities organize community and create relationships of reciprocal exchange, function to create social networks that offer an alternative to modern patterns of consumptive leisure and the alienated marketplace.
2. Shared patterns of sociality [2.1] My interest in these issues is more than academic. My passport into all of these communities was American and British traditional and political folk music. Historic musicians, historic dancers, historic reenactors, SF/F fans, and SF/F authors all moved in the same circles, and often were the same people and engaged in similar conversations across specific interests and social circles. These communities overlapped and came together at official and institutional gatherings such as the Renaissance festival and SF/F conventions, but also gathered at recurring traditional but less formal gatherings like parties for Twelfth Night, Mayday, equinox, and solstice, as well as ceilidh, square, and contra dances.  3. Communities of exchange: Fandom and historical economy [3.1] Historical reenactment, music, dance, and fandom function as communities in more than just gatherings to share abstract interests; they also organize material exchange. Renaissance festivals are an obvious example where many of the performers travel the circuit to make their living in entertainment, food, or craft. As such, Renaissance festivals are a commercial enterprise. However, all these communities (even the least commercial) also function to support a cadre of small tradespeople and artisans who serve the community's needs, both esoterically and generally. Reenactment groups create a thriving trade for costume and historic gear that is often served by local artisans, jewelers, and merchants. [3.2] In reenactment there is also a professional cadre who work in living history museums. The same goes for fandom. On the one hand, there is the professional cadre of editors and authors who interact with fans at conventions, whose job it is to produce the literature, film, Web sites, fanzines, and other material fans consume.
There is a second tier of trade in the dealers' room where jewelers and merchants sell their crafts and collectables next to publishers selling their books. among a large number of artisans whose jobbing network was based in these social groups, but I have also seen the network link people to each other in roles such as personal secretaries, mechanics, personal assistants, lawyers, medical professionals, and informal aides. These extended relationships fulfill people's needs for services outside modern impersonal market channels or social work bureaucracies. These social networks of affiliation, discourse, and material interaction account for at least some of the longevity and continuity of fandom. It should also not be ignored that people involved in reenactment and fandom also often find their romantic relationships there.
As such they truly function as communities organizing both productive and reproductive relationships.  interests and participants, with many members who live across these imposed divides.

Symposium
The      archivist, or enthusiast. Located on the fourth floor of the Rivera Library, past the operational printing presses and the glassedin displays of SF novel covers, its sunlit reading room and cheerful student help render the Eaton Collection vaguely unintimidating-until one gets past the small anteroom and into the collection itself. Then, the holdings stretch out across dizzying, dusty rows, bearing silent witness to the quiet exclamation from someone who just found the dust jackets carefully arranged over, say, the first few impossibletofind editions of her favorite comic. Or the frail cover of some sfnal treasure in its first translated edition-or perhaps the first edition itself. This vast array of papers, drafts, novels, anthologies, and other print matter evinces a long history of accumulated fandoms, material evidence of lifetimes of passionate enthusiasm all accumulated and accounted for, archived for anyone with a library pass, a yen for context, and a good eye for buried treasure. But the immediate involvement of fandom at large in the fanzines' archival preservation remains somewhat obscured, even in Slusser's careful mosaicist's rendering. Melissa Conway's expert recollection helps flesh out the interstices.    [3.10] She paused, long enough that I feared a dropped phone or a lost connection.

Interview with Melissa Conway
"I would always want to have that extra layer, that extra texture, of the relationship with the manuscript," she finally concluded. "There's a similar sense of the immediacy." Her value for this persistence is something she readily admits might well be romanticized, but it sounds suspiciously familiar. One could say I recognize her enthusiasm.  as a question concerning fankind. Slusser's historically focused, fanzinecentric enthusiasm leads him to posit the fanzine as the precursor to the currently Internet driven fandom paradigms of nearinstantaneous call and response: "The essential function of the fanzine is to generate and disseminate the interaction of an optimal number of participants, pushing the limitations of the print medium to its maximum speed and range in terms of its ability to produce interactive dialogue. In this sense, the fanzine is the forerunner of the Internet" (http://eaton collection.ucr.edu/fanac/Page68.htm). Perhaps more specifically, the preservation of the fanzine could be seen as a kind of recognition, an acknowledgment of contemporary fandom's inheritance of the fanzines' tight focus and critical response toward a set of genres whose popularity once stood somewhat askew from accepted mores. This curatorial stance allows for concentrated action as well as scholarly consideration; indeed, for material evidence of fanac under stringent conditions, surely today's communities of enthusiasts need not look too far. -Ray Bradbury [1] Media fandom is an ephemeral culture, and online fandom even more so. A printed zine from the 1970s may last longer than a story published online in the last six months. In fact, continual changes in publication preference and fannish infrastructure have impacted the accessibility and permanence of fan fiction: zines may have a much lower initial circulation, but hard copies have a permanence that newsgroup posts, mailinglist emails, or blog posts may lack. Even as fandom as a whole has become more widely accepted and openly public, distribution patterns have moved away from public archives toward individual fan archiving, which allows writers to maintain greater control.

Acknowledgments
[2] For some, fandom is a private endeavor, and that very impermanence a desirable feature. But for those who seek to read and be read, to build on and be inspired by the collective history of fannish creativity, there is nothing so vital to authorial fandom's survival as the archive. Moreover, if we think of the fan community as a whole, and less of individual writers, losing our stories may indeed mean losing parts of our history.
[3] The nature of online archives has long reflected the environment and technology they occupy. In the following, I intend to give a brief overview of the main online interfaces fans have used to share their works and how these have affected authorial control, reader accessibility, and general permanence. In so doing, I suggest that privacy and customizability are often traded off in favor of general accessibility and permanence; while I clearly prefer the archival structure that will allow those coming after us to access the wealth of stories that media fandom has created through the decades, I also fully understand why some authors prefer to retain tight control over their writings.
[4] Media fannish production in the 1970s and 1980s, its initial two decades, was mostly shared via zines and amateur press associations (APAs to provide a space for shared activity, such as fandomspecific discussion or story posting. However, it became common practice for authors to link back to their own journals rather than mirroring their stories in the community space, making those communities little more than collections of announcements, rather than any sort of central archive. [11] As of 2011, LiveJournal still has no robust search function [16] Outside a central archive, it is important that authors be encouraged to archive their stories and not rely upon technology that is ever more fragile and impermanent. Automated archives, such as Archive of Our Own (http://archiveofourown.org) and those running eFiction archiving software (http://www.efiction.org/), allow authors to submit stories themselves, lightening or removing the burden of manual archiving.
Automatic archives also allow authors the same level of control over their content that they would have on LiveJournal or on a personal archive, but without those platforms' vulnerabilities and obscurities. With a consistent repository for stories, recommendation sites and bookmarking services such as Delicious can be used to create targeted subsets of fan fic, just as themed miniarchives do, compensating for the findability problems that even the most wellindexed archives suffer.
[17] The health of authorial and fan fic-reading fandom is best served by strong central archives, and by a culture that recognizes the worth of archiving. Archives, of course, raise their own theoretical issues about quality control, not to mention their actual logistics: whoever runs the archive can impose control over what is permitted and what is deleted. After all, it is rare for admins to deny authors the right to edit or remove their own stories, but this is a power that can become very problematic indeed when archivists become curators, choosing to enforce quality and value judgments.
And yet I want to argue that for the author, the endeavor is worthwhile: to archive a story is not just to surrender control of it; to archive a story is to contribute it to the memory of fandom, and make it available to those who enjoy the shared source material, whether it be a book or a film or a television series.
[18] Those who enter a fandom learn the culture of the fans through their fiction: the fanon explanations, the subtextual relationships that are made text, the rereading and rewriting of source texts into something nurtured and expanded upon. Those new participants who enter the fandom are inspired by what they read, learn from what they read, and build upon it, creating complex and everdeepening interpretations that are shared with those who came before and after them. Creation of new narratives within the structure of fan fiction is arguably a primary lifeblood of media fandom. This is the importance of stories, and the importance of preservation, and of not allowing them to be swept away by the very technology that enables them to be enjoyed by so many.

Symposium
An archive of one's own: Subcultural creativity and the politics of conservation Alexis Lothian

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States
[0.1] Abstract-In response to a rapidly changing scene of intellectual property in digital media, activist fans have mobilized to develop a communal, nonprofit group to provide fans with an "archive of their own", protecting fan works from deletion by server hosts who believe those works to be in breach of copyright. In 2008, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) incorporated as a nonprofit, and the Archive of Our Own went live in 2009. I am a paidup member of the OTW-and publishing in the journal it sponsors, after being part of the editorial team for the first five issues-because I believe in the artistic and cultural importance of fan works and I want them to be preserved. But I also believe we must look critically at the meaningmaking projects that are encompassed within the OTW's goal of legitimatizing and preserving fan works for the future. Derrida also reminds us that questions of archives are always questions of archons, of who controls the structures through which meaning is created and maintained (Derrida 1996, 1). Archives and archiving are always already political. As some online fan practices become part of mainstream media's marketing machine, while others find themselves without a server space to call their own, members of fan subcultures who are particularly invested in the critical properties of their production have sought representation for their community by consciously intervening in archive politics. In response to a rapidly changing scene of intellectual property in digital media, activist fans have mobilized to develop a communal, nonprofit group to provide fans with an "archive of their own" (http://archiveofourown.org), protecting fan works from deletion by server hosts who believe those works to be in breach of copyright.  their antiprofit world using Web services owned by companies who seek to profit from every byte of data archived on their servers, companies to whom subcultural norms are irrelevant (note 1). Fans' archontic production has been seen by corporations less as a danger, like digital piracy, than as a resource to be exploited-"usergenerated content" that enables the selling of advertising space. While fans bring the content, corporations keep the revenue.

Ownership
[2.1] The Archive of Our Own emerged as an archontic struggle in the face of corporate media's wish to capitalize on its undercommons. It seeks to protect fan works by giving them a reliable place within the changing world of publishing and property. The politics of this archive are explicitly concerned with legitimizing "transformative" uses under US law, clarifying the uncertain legal place of fan works for the sake of their makers' legal safety. The OTW wishes to halt its archival subculture's reliance on the incidental and unreliable archiving of most online information, which can so easily disappear or be appropriated, and provide a "deposit library" for fan works. The OTW insists that its storage will provide cultural memory that "lasts for a very long time," "preserving fanworks for the future" by producing an organized and searchable memory for the community, solidifying its history and meanings (OTW FAQ, http://transformativeworks.org/faq277).
[2.2] Derrida writes that "every archive…is at once institutive and conservative.
Revolutionary and traditional" (1996, 7). The OTW's archive project wears both functions on its sleeve, seeking to build "a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative, and accepted as a legitimate creative activity," by pursuing aggressively traditional strategies of permanence and legitimation ("What We Believe," http://transformativeworks.org/about/believe). The OTW tries to protect fan communities by insisting that they are subcultural groupings constituted in support of capital, that "there shouldn't be trouble, because fans are loyal customers." ("Does the OTW Represent All of Fandom?," http://transformativeworks.org/node/82). For all its valorization of fandom's noncapitalist culture, the OTW is keen to point out how the fan works it archives will continue to help others profit.
[2.3] Volunteers have designed and coded an opensource software archive tailored lovingly to store and distribute a collected body of fans' art and knowledge, offering an alternative or supplement to the distributed, chaotic archive culture in which the Internet and online fandom tend to exist. The organization takes a political stance in favor of recognizing digital storage as a form of cultural memory. It seeks to preserve its community and culture as a grassroots print archive might, honoring fan culture's preInternet history. But, as Derrida writes, what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way: the OTW may serve its purpose admirably, but it will inevitably fail to account for some aspects of the culture it wants to serve.

Wank
[3.1] At least part of this failure will be because, while fandom may be an archive culture-producing archontic texts and keeping them in multiple archival spaces, which are not usually incorporated as nonprofit-its cultural specificities can't be traced only by looking at the archives designated to be the subculture's public face. The Archive, like the scholarship presented in Transformative Works and Cultures, offers fannish productions a seriousness and a permanence that they have rarely been awarded before. But just as TWC's academiafriendly discourse is not the sum total of fannish knowledge production, neither can the Archive be assumed to record everything of importance. Sometimes ephemeral digital interactions do cultural work as important as that which can more easily be archived for the future. In "Ephemera as Evidence," José Muñoz describes the unquantifiable aftereffects of performances and experiences as "traces, glimmers, residues and specks" that "maintain…experiential politics and urgencies long after those experiences have been lived" (Muñoz 1996, 10). No matter how rooted in cultural communality, an archive framed as a deposit library cannot account for the traces, glimmers, and residues that give the experience of subcultural participation its meanings and its feelings. And so we must also ask: what worlds are made in the digital places the OTW won't be preserving? What alternative archive politics and temporalities does fandom contain? Fandom Wank (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/) is probably fandom's most widely read archive of the ephemeral, collecting unseemly elements of online discourse whose range, from "endless flamewars" and "pseudointellectual definitions" to "selfaggrandizing posturing" and "circular egostroking," makes the derivation of the fannish term "wank" from the slang for masturbation quite clear.
Fandom Wank shares none of the OTW's political impetus, serious valuation of subculture as community, or desire to make fan culture comprehensible and appealing to the outside world. Yet it too facilitates longterm preservation of fan cultural practices, aggregating histories through an endless succession of injokes and links.
These ephemeral traces are likely to include fannish creations that are tangential or irrelevant, and sometimes oppositional, to the texts, both initial and archontic, around which they cluster. Yet the flows-the institution, destruction, and resurfacing of digital archives on the fly-produce the experiential politics of online fan culture.     around that time and I bought every zine I could lay my hands on. It was just an explosion of mimeograph and hectograph and ditto; very few zines were even photocopied back then. I read everything. Some of it was pretty good. Some of it was extremely good. But an awful lot of it was just plain awful.

Forty years of Mary Sue
[2.3] As Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. The amazing thing was, the crap had so much of a pattern. I'm very much a pattern seeker, and you could see that every Trek zine at the time had a main story about this adolescent girl who is the youngest yeoman or lieutenant or captain ever in Starfleet. She makes her way onto the Enterprise and the entire crew falls in love with her. They then have adventures, but the remarkable thing was that all the adventures circled around this character. Everybody else in the universe bowed down in front of her. Also, she usually had some unique physical identifier-oddcolored eyes or hair-or else she was half Vulcan. The stories read like they were written about half an hour before the zine was printed; they were generally not very good. Trek primers and parodies of the episodes.
[2.7] Q: That was the beginning?  3. When did you first discover vids? [1] With A Comics Studies Reader, editors Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (leading comics scholars themselves) aim to paint a portrait of the field targeted at a broad academic audience. As they write in their introduction, "While the present collection is designed for use in courses on comics, it is also aimed at readers who are curious about where comics sit in relation to other kinds of materials that might usefully be assigned in art history, communication arts, design, history, literature, political science, and sociology" (xii).

Introduction
[2] Heer and Worcester adopt an admirable strategy by splitting the book-and by extension comics studies-into four sections. "While the best of the new comics scholarship is eclectic, in approach and foci, it consistently returns to certain core themes: the history and genealogy of comics, the inner workings of comics, the social significance of comics, and the close scrutiny and evaluation of comics. Not coincidentally, these are the four themes we highlight in this book" (xi). After the introduction and a transcript of a lecture by Thierry Groensteen called "Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?," the rest of the book is quartered into "Historical Considerations," "Craft, Art, Form," "Culture, Narrative, Identity," and "Scrutiny and Evaluation." Each section includes six to eight essays from a mix of established and emerging comics scholars.
[3] Most of these essays are brilliant, but I found a few especially compelling. In the historical section of the book, David Kunzle's "Rodolphe Töpffer's Aesthetic Revolution" argues that the early 19thcentury Swiss caricaturist influenced the future of comics and cartooning by rejecting traditional classical artistic values and anticipating the modernist notion that art transforms nature and obeys its own rules outside of nature.
Peter Coogan's "The Definition of the Superhero" tells the story behind the 1952 legal decision that found Wonder Man copied and infringed upon Superman and, in so doing, defined the primary characteristics of a superhero as mission, powers, and identity. M.
Thomas Inge's "Two Boys from the Twin Cities" compares the lives of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and his neighbor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and discusses the impact Fitzgerald's work had on Schultz. Under the "Craft, Art, Form" heading, David Carrier's rumination on "Caricature" and its practices and mechanics is particularly compelling, as is Bart Beaty's "Autobiography as Authenticity" under "Culture, Narrative, Identity," which looks at the history of autobiographical comics and why they've proven so instrumental in comics' struggle to gain acceptance as Art. Obviously comics scholars keenly interested in the international aspects of comics, manga, and bande dessinée will be most interested in John Lent's "The Comics Debates Internationally" under "Historical Considerations," Robert Petersen's "The Acoustics of Manga" under "Culture, Narrative, Identity," and Adam Kern's "Manga vs. Kibyóshi" and Fusami Ogi's "Beyond Shoujo, Blending Gender" under "Culture, Narrative, Identity." As someone studying comparative media, I found Annalisa De Liddo's "Transcending Comics: Crossing the Boundaries of the Medium," in the book's fourth section, the most intriguing. De Liddo examines Alan Moore's works blending comics with other media, such as the mixedmedia performance pieces The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders, which utilize the notion of psychogeography in a fashion particularly applicable to locationbased entertainment. Slightly disappointing for the Transformative Works and Cultures audience is the general lack of attention paid to fan activity, but that may merely signal an opportunity for a future volume.
[4] A much bigger issue, unfortunately, is how the book stumbles as a reader. While A Comics Studies Reader is indeed, in Dictionary.com's phrase, "a book of collected or assorted writings, especially when related in theme, authorship, or instructive purpose," the book's own backcover claim to "introduce readers to the major debates and points of reference that continue to shape the field" is not supported by the editors' selections-or, more specifically, their exclusions. In the introduction, Heer and Worcester state, [5] Our anthology is intended as a starting point for defining comics studies as well as a springboard for further investigation…It is aimed at students, faculty, curators, librarians, and general readers. Our interest is in addressing readers who are engaged by comics of all kinds and from multiple vantage points, whether as product, construct, language, argument or aesthetic. (xii) [6] The problem is that this portrait is unbalanced by a distinct lack of, well, comics.
In the introduction, Heer and Worcester note that recent comics scholarship has paid special attention to formal aspects of comics, with Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics-both comics-serving as touchstones for this turn. However, both Eisner and McCloud are conspicuously absent from this volume. I'd assume that their absence was due to difficulties securing reprint rights if the book weren't permeated by an unsettling sense of prejudice against those comics practitioners who are also comics theorists. For example, although Understanding Comics is inarguably one of the most influential texts on comics, Heer and Worcester instead opt to include only an essay by R. C. Harvey "pointedly challenging" McCloud's work-and, more telling, while the editors introduce Harvey as both "a gifted historian" and a "theorist," they describe McCloud only as a "cartoonist" (13)(14). [9] If comics have become so popular and comics studies has become so accepted, then why is this book trying so hard?
[10] The exclusion of comics about comics is exceptionally puzzling since, if Heer and Worcester's intended audience is academics unfamiliar with comics, examples of comics tackling deeper theoretical issues can only be intriguing; if their audience is comics fans interested in theoretical issues, such works could help ease them into the thickets of academic discourse. Instead, the unspoken assertion seems to be that "comics can't do comics studies," which is both shortsighted and wrong, for the same reason that an introductory film studies course would be lacking without Orson Welles's F for Fake. If the goal of comics studies is to encourage deeper exploration of the theories and cultural practices of the medium, then it should absolutely include works done in that medium about that medium that have sparked significant debateand a reader that intends to deliver a representative sampling of the field as a whole must do so as well. Contrast this collection to Ben Schwartz's 2010 anthology The Best American Comics Criticism (Fantagraphics), which includes a sample of comics on comics from Seth ("High Standards") and is more comprehensive because of it. Granted, the last of these is more a coffeetable book than an example of rigorous scholarship, but a second edition of A Comics Studies Reader might be significantly improved by more illustrations.
[12] A Comics Studies Reader left me with just such an "in the next edition" wistfulness overall. In its current incarnation, the book would make a fine addition to the syllabus of any comics studies course. As it stands, however, it is not in itself an ideal introduction to comics studies, or sufficient as a primary textbook for such a course. A second edition, revised to include samplings from McCloud, Kochalka, and Eisner, an appendix or richer online companion list of resources telling interested readers where to go next (such as conferences, mailing lists, scholarly publications, suggested texts, university programs; the introduction makes some passing references, but more explicit resources would be useful), and a general easing up on the "comics are valid!" handwringing could make such an edition an invaluable text.
Here's hoping we get one.