The editors would like to invite chapters of 7,000 words for an edited collection, to be submitted to
Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture Book Series. We aim to publish the collection in 2025.
Readers have always interacted with texts to create unique interpretations. Imitations, adaptations, and
transformations–from reading texts aloud to dramatising them, from sequels in manuscript and print
to new media, from drawing characters for fun to making animated films–have long been central to
readers’ interactions with texts, particularly for girls and young women. These include, for example,
early modern girls’ adaptations of romances, Victorian girls’ creation of magazine clubs, and
contemporary fan fiction communities. Yet many of these practices have often been dismissed as
‘amateur’ and ‘girly’, with their authors and creators doubly marginalised due their age and gender.
They have, therefore, not always received the sustained critical attention they merit. This collection
seeks to retrieve girls’ and young women’s ‘amateur’ and ‘girly’ imitative, adaptive, and
transformative writing practices in diverse genres through time and across the globe.
Textual engagement is often at the heart of the educational and recreational cultures of young people,
with even the basic practices of becoming literate affording opportunities for creative response. Anne
Haas Dyson points out that copying is ‘not a reproductive task, but an intrinsic part of the production
process’ for young people (12). Similarly, Jackie Marsh writes that ‘children do not just adopt […]
narratives in an unreflective manner. They build on and develop […] narratives in interesting, creative
ways’ (32). Henry Jenkins’ phrase ‘textual poachers’ also illuminates children’s propensity to take
textual scaffolds and utilize them for their own creative purposes. We suggest that this practice,
though determined by historical context, has happened across time and space. In this landmark essay
collection, we wish to chart the history of girls’ textual participatory cultures from 1500 to the present
day.
Although work on the histories of girls’ and women’s transformative works exists, these practices and
communities–especially those predating the twentieth century–remain understudied (but see, e.g.,
Glosson, 2020; Hellekson, 2023; Rosenblatt & Pearson, 2017; Willis, 2016). This collection provides
fresh histories of ‘girly’ textual practices, considering how girls and young women have appropriated,
imitated, adapted, and transformed (popular) texts across time. In doing so, it seeks to create a deeper
history of modern-day fannish practices, one that spans centuries and continents.
Girls and young women, especially those who are further minoritised by race, class, sexuality, or
location, have been particularly drawn to participatory cultures, and especially to appropriative
writing. However, their writing has, historically, been relegated to the sidelines, and its histories and
trajectories are only now being recovered. Practices deemed ‘amateur’, such as creating homemade
magazines and writing fan fiction, are often lambasted, with female fans derided as ‘frenzied,’
‘hysterical,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘excessive’ (Busse 73–4). As scholars such as Melissa Click, Kristina
Busse, and Matt Hills have argued, fans who are both female and young are particularly pathologized,
with accusations of ‘girliness’ having been used as a basis for the widespread dismissal of many
cultural practices throughout time. We understand ‘girls and young women’ broadly and suggest that
how these categories are understood may vary depending on geographical or temporal contexts. As
such, we encourage abstracts that consider racialized, neurodivergent, disabled, LGBTQ+, or
otherwise minoritised groups of young people.
Contributions may include (but are not limited to) considerations of:
- Amateur and professional textual adaptations and transformations by girls and young women,
- from theatre performances and songs to commonplace books, magazines and fan fiction to
- film and social media
- The gendered and aged dimensions of rewriting and revising texts throughout time
- Authoring “official” and “unofficial” sequels
- Manuscript magazines and amateur printing
- Creating “Pickwick clubs” and other literary societies
- Revisiting and revising childhood reading and writing in adulthood
- Fanzines and participatory internet cultures
- Editorials, letters to the editor, and other literary critical correspondence
- Theoretical reflections on intertextuality and adaptation
- Theoretical reflections on age
- Theoretical and historical reflections on ideas of authorship and intellectual property
We invite the submission of abstracts of 350 words and brief author bio by 31 January 2024.
Accepted essays of 7,000 words will be due by 1 June 2024.
Editor feedback on essays: Fall 2024
Revised essays due: Spring 2025
Estimated publication: 2025
To be emailed to editors Lois Burke (l.m.burke@tilburguniversity.edu), Jennifer Duggan
(jennifer.duggan@usn.no) and Edel Lamb (e.lamb@qub.ac.uk).
References
Busse, Kristina. 2013. “Geek Hierarchies, Boundary Policing, and the Gendering of the Good Fan.”
Participations 10(1): 73–91. https://www.participations.org/10-01-06-busse.pdf.
Click, Melissa. “‘Rabid,’ ‘Obsessed,’ and ‘Frenzied’”: Understanding Twilight Fangirls and the
Gendered Politics of Fandom.” Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture.
https://www.flowjournal.org/2009/12/rabid-obsessed-and-frenzied-understanding-twilight-fangirls-and-the-gendered-politics-of-fandom-melissa-click-university-of-missouri/.
Glosson, Sarah. 2020. Performing Jane: A cultural history of Jane Austen fandom. Louisiana State
University Press.
Haas Dyson, Anne. 2010. ‘Writing childhoods under construction: Re-visioning ‘copying’ in early
childhood’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 10(1), 7–31. DOI: 10.1177/1468798409356990.
Hellekson, Karen. 2023. “Fandom, Fanzines, and Archiving Science Fiction Fannish History.”
Proceedings from the Document Academy 10(1). https://doi.org/10.35492/docam/10/1/2.
Hills, Matt. 2012. “Twilight Fans Represented in Commercial Paratexts and Inter-fandoms: Resisting
and Repurposing Negative Fan Stereotypes.” In Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the Twilight
Series, edited by Anne Morey, 113–29. Ashgate.
Marsh, Jackie. 2010. Childhood, Culture and Creativity: A Literature Review. Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Creativity, Culture and Education.
Rosenblatt, Betsy, and Roberta Person (Eds.). 2017. Sherlock Holmes, Fandom, Sherlockiana, and the
Great Game (special issue). Transformative Works and Cultures 23.
https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/view/27.
Willis, Ika (Ed.). 2016. The Classical Cannon and/as Transformative Work (special issue).
Transformative Works and Cultures 21.
https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/view/23.
The Fan Studies Network 