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"I Opened a Book and in I Strode": Fanfiction and Imaginative Reading

Barner, Ashley J.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1450868978

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, English (Arts and Sciences).
This dissertation studies imaginative reading and its relationship to fanfiction. Imaginative reading is a practice that involves engaging the imagination while reading, mentally constructing a picture of the characters and settings described in the text. Readers may imaginatively watch and listen to the narrated action, using imagination to recreate the characters’ sensations and emotions. To those who frequently read this way, imagining readers, the text can become, through the work of imagination, a play or film visualized or entered. The readers find themselves inside the world of the text, as if transported to foreign lands and foreign eras, as if they have been many different people, embodied in many different fictional characters. By engaging imaginatively and emotionally with the text, the readers can enter into the fictional world: the settings seem to them like locations they can visit, the many characters like roles they can inhabit or like real people with whom they can interact as imaginary friends and lovers. The readers feel that they have been absorbed into the world of the text, and sometimes into the characters. One genre of literature is particularly closely connected to the act of imaginative reading: Internet fanfiction. In fact, imaginative reading is the source of Internet fanfiction and thereby shapes many of the genre’s characteristics. Bringing imaginative reading to bear on fanfiction texts reveals characteristics of these texts and of the genre in which they participate. Because imaginative reading, especially of culturally devalued texts by young women, is frequently decried by critics, fanfiction, which is frequently written by young women about these culturally devalued texts, is often tarred with the same brush. Thus many of the characteristics of fanfiction derive from fan writers’ attempts to avoid the stigmas accruing to imaginative reading and readers.
Robert Miklitsch (Committee Chair)
Marsha Dutton (Advisor)
Thomas Dancer (Committee Member)
Katherine Jellison (Committee Member)
138 p.
Literature
reading; reading practices; fan fiction; fanfiction; fans; reception; adaptation; popular literature; reading; metafiction;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Barner, A. J. (2016). "I Opened a Book and in I Strode": Fanfiction and Imaginative Reading [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1450868978

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Barner, Ashley. "I Opened a Book and in I Strode": Fanfiction and Imaginative Reading. 2016. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1450868978.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Barner, Ashley. ""I Opened a Book and in I Strode": Fanfiction and Imaginative Reading." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1450868978

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1450868978
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This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.