The Story Continues

Just as fan fiction defies narrative beginnings and endings, this book closes not with a conclusion, but with an interlude. By uncovering the widespread practice of writing fan fiction in the eighteenth century, identifying the rules governing its creation, and analyzing the competing artistic, economic, and public interests at stake, ...

Fan Fiction in the Eighteenth-Century Literary Landscape

Chapter 5 examines the reciprocal relationship between authors and their readers who wrote fan fiction, illuminating the aesthetic consequences of fan fiction as part of a text’s dynamic reception. Based on close readings of key texts, including works by once-popular but now largely forgotten authors including Friedrich Nicolai, this chapter demonstrates the potential for interaction between works of fan fiction and their sources. Some source authors responded in footnotes and forewords to the unwanted appropriation of a character. Others wrote new chapters. And some, like Friederike Helene Unger, wrote entire sequels in response to the fan fiction they inspired. The result is a dense network of interlinked texts. This chapter contends that fan fiction gave rise to a unique form of collaborative authorship distinct from the so-called Romantic author.

Customary Norms

Analyzing twenty-two examples of fan fiction, Chapter 3 uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production and dissemination of these works. After defining customary norms as an alternative to formal law and briefly accounting for their potential origin, this chapter analyzes each norm in detail. In all, five rules, or customary norms, governed the production of fan fiction in the eighteenth century. Together, they amounted to a customary intellectual property regime comprising rights, trespass norms, exceptions, and enforcement mechanisms. This chapter then examines an exception to the rules for publishers who held the right to publish sequels and continuations. Finally, it focuses on Nicolai’s Joys of Young Werther and Schiller’s Geisterseher as examples of the effectiveness of these mechanisms, showing how they prevented egregious departures from the customary norms.

Sanctions and Strategies of Control

Chapter 4 examines the ways in which authors, publishers, and critics punished violations of the customary norms that governed the production and dissemination of fan fiction in eighteenth-century Germany. Sanctions included official complaints, advertisements, negative reviews, and literary and personal attacks—norms that scholars refer to as public shaming or truthful negative gossip. This chapter then examines the effectiveness of these mechanisms and their wider fallout. In some instances the sanctions motivated third parties, like the famous engraver Chodowiecki, to refuse to deal with perpetrator authors. In other cases, the sanctions inspired the creation of memorable texts, like Goethe’s ribald poem, “Nicolai at Werther’s Grave.” Authors’ critical notes in prefaces, footnotes, and the texts themselves were among the most common form of sanction. Traces of these enforcement mechanisms linger in the texts we read today, long after the censured fan fiction has disappeared from our collective memory. This chapter concludes by analyzing additional strategies authors used to maintain exclusive control over the characters they invented, offering a new explanation for familiar practices in the book trade, such as the practice of announcing the final volume of a novel and soliciting reader feedback for ongoing works.

The Book Market, the Good Reader, and the Rise of Fan Fiction

Chapter 1 documents the rise of fan fiction in the decades after 1760, as it transformed from something radically unexpected to an accepted, if hotly debated, literary practice. This chapter argues that widespread changes in reading and writing habits, as well as the emergence of new aesthetic theories, provided a social and educational framework that primed readers to write fan fiction. The attendant writing revolution modified the book trade in ways that further spurred the creation of fan fiction. As the market became saturated with novels, publishers and booksellers looked for promising new products. Because works of fan fiction had established audiences, these texts became a safe bet for profit-hungry publishers and authors. The result was the proliferation of fan fiction.

Introduction

The Introduction raises the main questions answered by the book: how were characters regulated before the existence of intellectual property laws? Why does fan fiction proliferate after 1750? And how did fan fiction and its rules affect authorship and the law? It further provides a brief history of fan fiction from Homer to Goethe and offers an explanation of the methodology used in this text, combining legal anthropology, literary criticism, and historical analysis based on archival work. The Introduction places the work within existing scholarship on legal history, studies of eighteenth-century literature and the book trade, and intellectual property law.

The Stakes of Fan Fiction

Chapter 2 analyzes the legal landscape within which books were printed and sold to show that existing laws could not regulate the rapidly expanding corpus of fan fiction. It provides a detailed look at the book trade and the ways in which authors were compensated. The chapter then investigates the range of arguments made to justify and condemn fan fiction, highlighting the competing personal, artistic, economic, and public interests in the production and dissemination of these works. Identifying the stakes of the debate exposes the complexity of the relationship between readers, authors, and publishers vis-à-vis literary characters, and reveals the difficulty of devising an intellectual property scheme that could effectively balance these competing interests.

Fictional Characters in the Eighteenth-Century Literary Commons

The final chapter shows that fan fiction was treated as raising legal issues separate from piracy. This chapter argues that, because authors were newly vested with the legal capacity to hold rights in their literary creations, literary characters were not free to be appropriated however readers wished. Rather, literary characters constituted a distinctive form of communal property, the use of which was subject to conditions. Chapter 6 thus redefines the “literary commons” of eighteenth-century Germany, providing a new perspective on the rise of intellectual property rights. This chapter proposes a reevaluation of the concept of literary property, the history of moral rights, and the tradition of free culture.