Unknowable Room, a Harry Potter fanfiction and fan art archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).
In this post:
OTW Guest Post: Marina Cano
From time to time, the OTW will be hosting guest posts on our OTW News accounts. These guests will be providing an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom where our projects may have a presence. The posts express each author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. We welcome suggestions from fans for future guest posts, which can be left as a comment here or by contacting us directly.
Dr. Marina Cano is a teaching fellow in Women’s Writing in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests include women’s writing, the long nineteenth-century, performance and gender theory. Today, Marina talks about her recent book Jane Austen and Performance
How did you first become interested by fandom and fanworks?
I am an Austen scholar and came to fandom through Jane Austen, rather than the other way around. My book, Jane Austen and Performance, traces Austen’s popular reception from the nineteenth century to the present: for instance, how the suffragettes appropriated Austen as a model of feistiness and, how after World War I, people kept adapting her novels to the amateur and school stage in an attempt to redefine what it meant to be English. I also study Austen and World War II through Emma and its afterlives, and through early stage versions of Austen in Scotland and America during the 1940s-50s. (more…)
This Week in Fandom, Volume 54
Welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things which are happening! Before we start, a shoutout to Fandom‘s blog for the best headline to come out of E3: ‘Super Mario Odyssey’ Shows You Can Teach an Old Hat Magical New Tricks. You can watch the trailer for the game here on Nintendo’s YouTube channel. And while we’re talking trailers, check out new material from Spiderman: Homecoming.
It’s been 20 years since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published. Wow. Mashable published an article about how technology grew along with the series, allowing the fandom to grow and author JK Rowling to engage with it. Scroll.in also published a long article about the anniversary which sums up the series’ impact pretty well:
“What we celebrate on June 26 is more than a bestselling children’s book series, but what it has come to mean and developed into in the twenty years since 1997. The everlasting effects of the magic can be seen all around the muggle world, which will now forever pale in comparison to the wonderful wizarding world created by JK Rowling. Countless Potterheads are still waiting for an owl to fly in through a window with our letters from The Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. We won’t give up!”