Cait Coker

Call for proposals: DH+BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History. Deadline for 250 word proposals October 1, acceptance by 10/15. MSS due December 30, Transparent P2P review December 30-January 15, Revisions 1/15-Feb 28.

Though women have been printing alongside men since the invention of the printing press, their stories have been comparatively neglected in the scholarship. In many studies, women remain nameless. John W. Moore provided the following cautionary fable regarding women in an early German print shop in his 1886 collection Historical Notes on Printers and

As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can finally consider the text as a closed canon that offers new possibilities for analysis. While previous volumes from throughout its run have examined the series through the lenses of genre, theology, and philosophy, this collection will analyze the show through the thus-far underused lenses of fan, gender, sexuality, and porn studies. Supernatural's use and interpretations of sexualities, queerness, consumption of pornography and human bodies (sometimes literally) speaks to both horror tropes and to cultural anxieties. The longevity of the show also allows it to act as a litmus test for changing mores in sex and gender representation. The goal of this edited volume will be to analyze these topics across the breadth of the show and its related texts, including licensed novels and comics and fan fiction and meta.

As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can finally consider the text as a closed canon that offers new possibilities for analysis. While previous volumes from throughout its run have examined the series through the lenses of genre, theology, and philosophy, this collection will analyze the show through the thus-far underused lenses of fan, gender, sexuality, and porn studies. Supernatural 's use and interpretations of sexualities, queerness, consumption of pornography and human bodies (sometimes literally) speaks to both horror tropes and to cultural anxieties. The longevity of the show also allows it to act as a litmus test for changing mores in sex and gender representation. The goal of this edited volume will be to analyze these topics across the breadth of the show and its related texts, including licensed novels and comics and fan fiction and meta.

This article articulates a digital adaptation of enumerative bibliography and argues for its recuperative potential in feminist literary history. Digital enumerative bibliography uses bibliographical structures within a relational database that allows researchers to track more relevant metadata such as geographical location of subject matter, language, and time period. Whereas traditional enumerative bibliographies use a hierarchy of textual data, a relational database creates a nexus that facilitates new kinds of research queries. As an example, we offer our digital project the Women in Book History Bibliography and use its 1,550 citations as a dataset to trace what is women’s book history. We then advocate for digital enumerative bibliography as a form of feminist recovery efforts that recovers not only primary texts but scholarship about them.

Empirical  bibliography  is  “an  effort  to  understand  the  manner  in  which  a  book  was  constructed  through  immediate  physical  experience  (including  the  systematic  and  repeatable  process  of  testing  and  verification  based  on  historical  methodology)”  (Samuelson  and  Morrow  2015,  86).  As  a  pedagogical  tool,  it  has  been  adopted  at  multiple  institutions  as  a  method  of  teaching  book  history—where  “book”  is  implicitly  understood  to  be  a  printed  codex  created  for  public  consumption.  However,  programs  that  look  at  writing  and  manuscript  work  have  not  utilized  similar  methods,  or  if  they  have,  on  a  much  reduced  scale;  for  example,  courses  in  manuscripts  and  paleography  are  generally  focused  on  learning  skills  to  read  a  text  rather  than  to  produce  one.  I  would  argue  that  at  least  part  of  the  discrepancy  between  the  material  study  of  print  and  manuscript  is  because  of  gender:  Even  as  print  culture  was  becoming  the  norm  of  consumption,  women  continued  to  write  and  circulate  their  work  in  manuscript  form  well  into  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries.  While  scholarship  is  increasingly  willing  to  tackle  the  material  aspect  of  bibliography  and  print  and  how  they  can  inform  these  concepts,  the  questions  of  gender  and  of  manuscripts  are  ones  that  remain  to  be  fully  scrutinized.  By  adding  empirical  bibliography  to  our  toolbox,  feminist  scholars  can  revise  our  narratives  in  a  different  way  in  a  different  location,  and  push  beyond  the  familiar  conceptions  of  the  “book”  to  consider  alternate  narratives  of  book  history.

Despite its vocal support for social justice, both fandom (and acafandom) as a whole continues to ignore the way race and privilege work within slash communities, especially how the vast bulk of fic and art remains devoted to prioritizing white cis-bodies. Fans often defend
this “default,” pointing to the lack of nuanced, fleshed out non-white characters in texts that attract fandom attention. However, as media texts become more diverse, this argument has begun to be disproven. An example of this that has been enacted most recently and vividly has been in the MCU fandom, focusing around the character of Sam Wilson. Introduced in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and appearing in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Antman), Sam Wilson is Steve Roger’s close friend and ally, and has caused a significant ripple in the competing “order” of Steve/Tony and Steve/Bucky pairings. While Sam’s character and background spoke directly to all the things fandom has claimed it wanted—diversity, acknowledgements of PTSD and trauma, even literalizing social justice through a brief mention of Sam’s thwarted political run—he is nonetheless continually erased or attacked (most infamously when a Big Name Fan in Steve/Tony declared that he “had” to be part of HYDRA) specifically because he is black, enacting narrative violence on the black body that is an echo of the literal violence shown to black characters both onscreen, repeatedly, and in real life.

From the release of its first trailer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens received a racist backlash in response to the character of Finn, a black Stormtrooper turned hero. Nonetheless, after the film’s debut, slash fans across the Internet joined to make the Finn/Poe and Finn/Poe/Rey relationships (known as ‘ships) among the most popular in both art and fiction, in what seemed to be a welcome sign of fandom’s evolution from the usual orgy of white cis-bodies. However, by the time TFA was available for legal download, the Kylo/Hux ‘ship had overtaken the others significantly, despite their lack of screentime and actual lines, and the fact that they were “actual space Nazis” and “evil space boyfriends.” This essay will explore the intersections of racism and misogyny in TFA fanfiction and discuss why these most problematic ‘ships have become the most popular, and consider how the mainstreaming of the Empire in the popular imagination is a form of political whitelash.

Contemporary fan fiction is overwhelmingly digital in both publication and dissemination; it has never been easier to access this subculture of writers and writing. However, fan fiction in print has likewise never been so accessible, as a slew of recent popular novels proudly proclaim their fannish origins and make claims such as "More Than 2 Million Reads Online—FIRST TIME IN PRINT!" Further, traditional fannish mores insist that fan work should never be done for profit, and yet numerous print works adapted from fan fiction have become best sellers. I would like to problematize how we consider form and content in both creation and reception, how the popular value of work waxes and wanes in relation to its fan fiction status. In other words, how can we read fan fiction as part of a continuum of historical publication practices by women, and problematize our hierarchies of value between print and digital?

The English printing house was initially conceived, legally, as a printing house, with public work taking place in a private setting. This private space emphasised the traditional hierarchies of political and legal order: Women’s work that took place within the printing house thus fell into the traditional role of household labours. This erasure of labour is one that foregrounds the erasure of women’s writing from history; women who worked in essence as publishers, as printers and booksellers, are very clearly present in the historical records but invisible in our narratives of book history. How did this erasure happen, and why is their presence, and work, overlooked? If we consider the language of space in theory and reread Moxon’s Mechanickal Exercises closely, we see the ways in which the ideas of space itself can be implicitly gendered, and how this might shape our idea of the printing house.

This paper is part of a long-term project on fannish literary history; as such I perhaps have more questions in mind than answers. These include: What does it mean that we have a canon of Fan Studies scholarship, but not of fan writers or fan texts? Why are the male scholars of Fan Studies canonized at the expense of the women scholars, especially when the primary sources at hand are predominantly authored by women? Is “fanfiction” a genre or a medium? Does it make sense to talk about old fen, new fen, truefen, theories of reading and writing, socioeconomics, narratives of performativity, low and high and middlebrow culture when it comes to how fans publish over time? Is a literary history of fandom even possible, and if it is, what is it?

ABSTRACT Star Trek fandom is well known as the cradle of slash fiction, particularly Kirk/Spock (K/S) or fiction focusing on the romance between Kirk and Spock. The 2009 film that rebooted the franchise likewise rebooted its fandom, creating several factions in response to the newly canonical Spock/Uhura romance. This article overviews the history of Star Trek slash and investigates how the introduction of Reboot pairings in fandom takes on historic resonances, rewrites historic characterizations and introduces new genres and tropes into the fan writing of this franchise.

Discussions of gender in book history have largely been confined to recovering women’s writing and women’s reading. This has created several narratives that have governed our analysis: one being the persecuted woman writer, who is either openly operating in the public sphere to public stigma and condemnation, or in the private sphere and expertly navigating alternate forms of publication through manuscript; another being the passive and persecuted woman reader, whose appetite for novels especially in the long eighteenth century managed to champion an evolving form and genre that continues to be attacked today; the last being the active member of the trades either as printer, binder, or hawker, an exceptional role viewed as a blip in history writ large that is quickly subsumed by male industrialists. Despite a clear trajectory of greater involvement and activity by and for women in the trade, they nonetheless often remain shadowy figures in academic scholarship, popular criticism, and artistic acknowledgement. What I hope to consider here, then, is not just how we might recover the narratives of women in the book trades, but how we have arrived at some of these narratives ourselves.

Sammelband has three main focuses: theoretical approaches, gathering materials and resources, and practical exercises for the classroom. The first discusses the motivations for and benefits of dedicating classroom space to empirical bibliography, or learning through replicating historical processes (Samuelson and Morrow, 2015; paywalled). The second will help build a teaching library by listing reliable dealers of materials and anticipated costs. We organize these posts around building working “kits” for classrooms, workshops, and personal use. The last category provides practical advice for how to implement this in undergraduate and graduate classrooms in history, literature, and library sciences, although many of these exercises could be used at the secondary and primary levels with modifications. We link to open-access resources and provide our own, as well as a supplementary space to discuss methods and effectiveness on social media.

We want to provide a hub where work on women's writing and labor finds a voice. Often women's voices and labor are marginalized in major book history companions and readers, but this is not for a lack of scholarship on the subject. We hope to ameliorate a lack of attention by providing a venue for the clear interest scholars and readers have in women's lives and work. Updated regularly; submissions welcome.

In the long Eighteenth Century, women emerged in the official records as full-fledged members (apprentices and journeymen) of the Stationers’ Company and took part in its rigorous guild system, and then disappeared. Numerous reasons have been put forth as to what caused this shift in the recognition and perception of gendered workers, which I would like to reconsider by looking more closely at seventeenth-century English printing houses as sites of labor, production, materials, and costs. Materializing gender in print takes three forms: the narrative of how men saw women in printing houses (largely symbolically with only little inroads in acknowledging very real labor), the narrative of how women saw themselves (and men), and the narrative of the masculine default (in which if men see women they still don’t see them as women, just as extensions of men).

As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can finally consider the text as a closed canon that offers new possibilities for analysis. While previous volumes from throughout its run have examined the series through the lenses of genre, theology, and philosophy, this collection will analyze the show through the thus-far underused lenses of fan, gender, sexuality, and porn studies. Supernatural 's use and interpretations of sexualities, queerness, consumption of pornography and human bodies (sometimes literally) speaks to both horror tropes and to cultural anxieties. The longevity of the show also allows it to act as a litmus test for changing mores in sex and gender representation. The goal of this edited volume will be to analyze these topics across the breadth of the show and its related texts, including licensed novels and comics and fan fiction and meta.