Letters from Austenland
The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals how fanfiction is a design medium. The chapter analyzes how Austen prequels, sequels, and rewrites, through their medial gravitation to epistolary forms (letters and diaries), collectively render their explorations of narrative possibility a means of perceiving and undoing the medial foreclosures enacted by Austen’s narrative voice and its reliance on free indirect discourse. It further contends that, as a population, canonical-universe fanfiction collectively renders narrative a vehicle of virtual place-making, thereby aligning fanfiction more with open-source media design—for example, Software Development Kits (SDKs)—than with the documentary impulses implied by the figure of the fanfiction “archive.” Given that canonical-universe Austen fanfiction preserves the geographical centrality of Austen novels’ fictional English country estates to their canonical universes, the estates become hypermedial figures for realist Austen fanfiction’s own place-making practices and its media platforms.