Shakespeare’s Fans

Download or read book Shakespeare’s Fans written by Johnathan H. Pope and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Shakespearean adaptations through the critical lens of fan studies and asks what it means to be a fan of Shakespeare in the context of contemporary media fandom. Although Shakespeare studies and fan studies have remained largely separate from one another for the past thirty years, this book establishes a sustained dialogue between the two fields. In the process, it reveals and seeks to overcome the problematic assumptions about the history of fan cultures, Shakespeare’s place in that history, and how fan works are defined. While fandom is normally perceived as a recent phenomenon focused primarily on science fiction and fantasy, this book traces fans’ practices back to the eighteenth century, particularly David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Shakespeare’s Fans connects historical and scholarly debates over who owns Shakespeare and what constitutes an appropriate adaptation of his work to online fan fiction and commercially available fan works.