“Her sort of trouble”

The chapter uses material from Vivien Leigh’s British Library papers to forge a new approach to histories of her struggles with mental health. The chapter examines how this particular aspect of her life is represented within the archive. As a case study, I analyze fan letters that were generated in response to press coverage of the breakdown Leigh suffered while filming Elephant Walk in 1953. The chapter shows how predominantly female fan writers corresponded with Leigh. In turn, they capitalized on the simultaneous intimacy and distance of the fan letter to create a platform for self-exploration. More broadly, the chapter considers the cultural frameworks in which such fan-inflected confession gestated. It reads the content of the letters against a backdrop of attitudes toward women’s mental health at this time.

PERCEPTION OF THE IMAGE OF STAKHANOVKA: FAN LETTERS TO DUSYA VINOGRADOVA, 1935–1936

The main question of the article is why Soviet citizens of different professions and ages wrote letters to Stakhanovka, who was the first Soviet celebrity. To answer it, the author relies on "celebrity studies", a new direction in the social sciences and humanities, in which historians turn to the study of "celebrity culture". In the article, a celebrity is seen not as a status assigned to an individual and providing prestige and other social dividends, but as an analytical tool for analyzing the culture of society. Therefore, to study the mechanisms of the emergence and spread of celebrities, it is important to shift the research focus from studying the personality of a public figure to fame in general. In other words, it is important to pay attention to the cultural practices of consuming the image of a public figure, as well as to the political and social mechanisms by which these practices were constructed. Referring to "celebrity culture" as a tool for analysis, the author demonstrates that in the 1930s, the Soviet Union was not an anomaly in comparison to the Western societies. The Soviet culture of celebrity was the basis of the planned economy and the authoritarian regime, but this did not exclude the presence of non-repressive, democratic phenomena among the audience of the central Soviet press.

Fans, community, and conflict in the pages of "Picture Play," 1920–38

Fan history remains a neglected subdiscipline of fan studies, in part because of the methodological complications in dealing with a community of fans who may be deceased. Fan magazines, and particularly fan magazine letter sections, are a way for fan historians to access the views and opinions of classic Hollywood fans of the 1920s and 1930s—a community otherwise largely lost to history. Judicious use of the freely available 1920, 1930, and 1940 US census records helps researchers establish which letters were written by real, existing fans; further census information can help establish a demographic profile of the fan magazine community as a whole. Content analysis of fan letters illustrates the preoccupations of particular fans, as well as the way they established and negotiated particular codes of behavior within their fandom. A focus on particular fans who wrote to the magazine repeatedly over the course of multiple years can help historians recreate the fannish journey traveled by now-dead fans over the course of years or even decades.

Structural affects of soap opera fan correspondence, 1970s–80s

Paper correspondence between fans and creators/producers is a sort of historiographic challenge to the imagined shift from so-called analog to digital fandom. It opens the possibility of applying digital methodologies to archival objects as researchers continue to historicize fan practices, identities, and cultures. Using the archival papers of soap opera showrunners Frank and Doris Hursley, and Bridget and Jerome Dobson as a case study for this structural-affective analysis, I draw data and metadata from approximately three hundred fan letters and responses. Trends of emotion across the letters figure prominently in an analysis of the affective strategies used by both fans and creators to create an intimately collaborative televisual experience. The letters contain layers of valuable metadata, including filing conventions, typography, and collage; these permit identification of negotiations of power over the televisual narrative, and they provide valuable insights into the affective textures of the soap fan's everyday life. Digital fan studies foregrounds the integration of fandom into one's online life, as well as the importance of social media in closing the gulf between fan and creator. This praxis expands on the value of analog tools—pen, paper, scissors, and typewriter—to the predigital television fan's virtual life. Material communication played and continues to play an important role in fomenting fannish identity, exercising industrial literacy, performing affective engagement, and navigating an enduring, affectionate tension between author and audience.

Ghosts of American Literature: Receiving, Reading, and Interleaving Edna St. Vincent Millay's The Murder of Lidice

The history of Edna St. Vincent Millay's long World War II propaganda poem he Murder of Lidice reveals the transmedial logics that affected its publication and the media conditions that shaped its reception. After commissioning the poem in 1942, the Writers’ War Board coordinated a high-profile, strategically sequenced release, in which eight versions of the poem went public during a single week—periodical versions in he Saturday Review of Literature and Life magazine, a live performance featuring Hollywood actors, an NBC radio broadcast of that live performance, globally broadcast radio versions in three languages, and a book issued by Harper and Brothers. Comparing a set of fan letters (written in response to the NBC and Life versions) with a collection of interleaved book versions of the poem (books with newspaper articles stored between their pages) suggests how audiences might have been moved by the media of Murder's distribution as much as by the content of the poem itself.

Scandalous Evidence

This chapter examines the status and work of women in the early Bombay film industry (1930s–1940s), using the historiographic productivity of actresses embroiled in scandals as an entry point. It reconstructs scandal narratives in a jigsaw fashion using a variety of sources, including film magazines, biographies, creative nonfiction writing, fan letters, and interviews conducted in Bombay from 2008 to 2013. The chapter considers how the film historian might use “illegitimate” sources of history to approach lived histories of Indian cinema's work culture. It approaches scandal as a discursive form that proliferates textually and orally rather than as a temporally contained mediatized event. Taking two Bombay actresses of the 1930s and 1940s, Devika Rani and Naseem Banu, as case studies, and moving outward from the initial scandal narratives, the chapter re-imagines the possibilities and pressures that stars like them encountered in the film studio as well as in the public eye. It argues that the early film actress should be seen as a manifestation of, and model for, the urban working woman in 1930s and 1940s Bombay.

A case study of early British Sherlockian fandom

Previous studies of Sherlock Holmes fandom have concentrated on fan letters as being exemplary of the early beginnings of the Great Game: a fantasy played by fans that acts upon the belief that Sherlock Holmes exists. Fans, while fully comprehending that it is indeed a fantasy or a game, perform fan activities such as historical and literary analysis as if Holmes were real. This paper shifts the focus away from letter writing as the central means of the expression of this ironic belief and looks at the example of collecting autographs as a means of celebration of the canon. It places the autograph in its historical context of being the meeting point between the remnants of the Romantic theory of genius, the development of pseudosciences such as the interpretation of handwriting, and the literary, cultural, and commercial landscape in which Holmes appeared.

Les Midinettes Révolutionnaires

In their quest for official and cultural recognition, French First Wave critics such as Louis Delluc discursively positioned the working-class female cinemagoer as emblematic of the sorry state of unsophisticated French film audiences. From this discourse came the stereotype of the starry-eyed midinette, which is still used by French film critics to describe lowbrow film taste and an overly emotional mode of spectatorship. This essay attempts to reconstruct the social practice of cinemagoing among the midinettes of 1920s working-class Paris by focusing on the female fans of the serial Les deux gamines (1921). Both a critique of intellectual cinephilia as a cultural discourse and a geographically specific retrieval of the multiple ways in which socioeconomically and culturally marginalized audiences interacted with the cinema, this historical study repositions young women from working-class neighborhoods as key actors in film culture—fans, but also social activists. Through a study of disparate, unpublished archival material, including fan letters, film programs, and announcements in the leftist press, this essay attends to the social realities of a number of female film fans in Montmartre and grounds their spectatorship spatially within their local communities.

Fans of the Archive: Reading Fan Letters in Richmal Crompton's Archive

Richmal Crompton was a British twentieth-century writer of popular children’s stories. This seven minute film is about her fans, past and present, and is based in her archive at the University of Roehampton. It was made in collaboration with Archives and Special Collections and Media Services at the University of Roehampton, as well as members of the Just William Society and Richmal Crompton’s family.This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on February 20th 2016 and published on March 24th 2016.