Call for Papers: Fan works and fan communities in the age of mechanical reproduction

Im Frühjahr 2011 wird ein Sonderheft der Zeitschrift Transformative Works and Cultures zum Thema "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" erscheinen. Herausgeberinnen sind Nancy Reagin und Anne Rubenstein. Einreichfrist war leider schon im Mai, aber hier ein paar Informationen über das, was uns erwartet (hoffentlich bin ich zum Zeitpunkt des Erscheinens schon mit meiner Diplomarbeit fertig...):

"Scholars of literature and popular culture, along with ethnographers and sociologists, have produced a rich and sophisticated body of literature about fan communities and creativity over the last twenty years, but most of this work has focused on groups of fans who have been active since the 1960s, and very little of it has been produced by historians. This special issue will focus on the rich history of fans and their engagement with a variety of objects of fandom. We seek to expand the range of topics and methodologies available to studies of fans and their communities, and we hope to understand fans better by studying them in their historical contexts.
We invite contributions that focus on fan works and/or fan communities from any place and time since the late eighteenth century. This periodization is informed by Walter Benjamin's idea that—thanks to the invention of lithography—the original artwork, with its unique aura, came into being at that point precisely because of the availability of cheap copies. He argued that the distinctions between original and mass-produced commercial art and media created the boundary between high and popular art, and between mass and bourgeois tastes. We wonder whether the historical study of fans and fan works might modify Benjamin's formulation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Does the long-standing existence of fan fiction, fan art, and other forms of community-generated fan works clarify or muddy his argument?
The special issue will be divided between scholarly contributions of 4,000 to 7,000 words, and oral histories of older fans. We will seek to include scholarly articles and oral histories that can be read against or with each other. For example, an interview of a present-day cosplayer might be juxtaposed with an article on nineteenth-century amateur drama".