[ecrea] CFP: Victorian Texts in Contemporary Fandoms

CFP

Victorian Texts in Contemporary Fandoms (Due date: Sep, 25, 2014).

In a practice Henry Jenkins famously refers to as “textual poaching,” 
fans appropriate characters and narratives from canonical texts in order 
to adapt and rewrite them in novel ways, and for a variety of reasons: 
artistic, political, communal, financial, emotional, sexual, and other. 
Contemporary fandoms are vast in scope, multi-platformed, multimedia 
subcultures which operate via an economy of participation that has 
typically held itself apart from academic study, while simultaneously 
being scorned as an ‘illegitimate’ subject of study by the academy. 
Recently, though, scholars from anthropologists to sociologists and 
literary theorists have begun to turn their attention to fandom and 
fanfiction as rich sites of cultural meaning. This attention is often a 
source of discomfort to the  fans themselves, even as a new hybrid, 
“acafan” attempts to bridge the divide.

Hybridity is the essence of these transformative works. Lev Grossman 
states, “Fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse than the canonical 
works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, 
centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every 
sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can 
imagine and a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. 
It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and 
bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and 
fiction and reality” (Forward, Fic).

This diversity includes Victorian texts; in multiple fandoms, fanfiction 
authors have used Victorian source material as a starting point for 
writing about characters from literature, television, film and celebrity 
culture, creating what are called, in fan parlance, “crossovers”. These 
crossovers address lacunae in both canons, overwriting a broader variety 
of experience onto each source text.

This panel seeks to explore that variety: the biodiversity of Victorian 
texts within contemporary fandoms. How are the body of the text and the 
bodies in the texts altered by fan authors? What does this reveal about 
the canonical texts, the bodies that inhabit them, the bodies that wrote 
them, and the bodies that produce and consume them now? How, as W.H. 
Auden might have put it, are Victorian texts “modified in the guts of 
the living”?

The panel chairs are looking for contributors a planned panel at the 
Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 2015 conference in 
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, on April 10-11 (original cfp here: 
http://web.uvic.ca/vsawc/vsawc-conferences/2015-conference/). Please 
submit a 250-word abstract to Elise Mitchell ((elise_mitchell /at/ uqac.ca) 
<mailto:(elise_mitchell /at/ uqac.ca)>) and/or Elyssa Warkentin 
((Elyssa.Warkentin /at/ umanitoba.ca) 
<mailto:(Elyssa.Warkentin /at/ umanitoba.ca)>) by September 25, 2014.