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May. 17th, 2020 05:04 pmCharacters before Copyright by Matthew Birkhold
My Shabbos reading yesterday. It's a review of the intertwining legal and literary history of 'fan fiction' in late 18th century Germany. Which you may not have realized was a thing but also sort of knew was a thing? I dunno, I had no conceptualization of late 18th Century German Fan Fiction as a thing, but I separately also was fully aware that there was such a thing as the Wertheriaden, spin-offs and fanworks inspired by Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Which of course is precisely the kind of thing the book is about.
I separately knew about some of this legal/literary landscape from Brand Luther, Andrew Pettegree's narrative of the impact of the printing press on the spread of Martin Luther's ideas. Pettegree's work familiarizes the reader with the mechanics of publishing in late medieval Germany, the complicated system of censorship and permission that eroded between Luther's time and the late 18th century as the Holy Roman Empire's legal reach splintered, leaving in its place a wild capitalist enterprise regulated almost entirely by public opinion and communal norms, with copyright-like ideas as a government monopoly ("the publishing privilege") holding very little force.
Into this landscape, with vernacular literacy spreading widely to the masses, little in the way of regulatory authority governing what constituted illegal copying or derivative work, and novels becoming massive pop cultural phenomena (complete with cosplay and fanart) "fan fiction" became a routine part of the commercial publishing landscape. Birkhold's introduction includes a plea to use the ahistorical term fan fiction to describe this work, because under a purely literary analysis it generally complied with the tenets of the standard modern academic definitions of fanfiction: sequels, missing scenes, alternate universe narratives, POV shifted retellings, all looking back to the original canon. For the most part this is fine, and in fact illuminating in what it reveals about the history that led to modern fanfic. But I don't think he confronts deeply enough the distinction that non-commercial vs. commercial fanfiction holds.
There's a weird bit in his conclusion, as he lists topics for future researchers to investigate, where he wonders aloud whether, much as modern fanfic often confronts topics involving societal outsiders and minority groups of all sorts, such a thread of outsider identity existed in late 18th century fan fiction. But of course it didn't in the fan fiction that Birkhold profiled! It was subject to the same market pressures and legal conditions as commercial original fiction in the period.
But otherwise I had few quibbles. It was fascinating in particular to see the various fanwanks of the day: The biggest all seem to center around Christian Friedrich Nicolai, both an author of commercial fanfiction and the creator of source works that themselves inspired fanfiction. On both counts, Nicolai prompted wank. His The Joys of Young Werther, a reworking of Goethe's novel with a happy ending, filled review journals with wanky arguments about the OOCness of his characters and his repudiation of Goethe's original themes... meanwhile doing gangbusters sales.
Meanwhile, his wildly successful Sebaldus Nothanker, itself fanfic of a not-nearly-as-popular novel by Thummel called Wilhelmine, inspired fanworks that claimed to fill in gaps in his novel. Not liking these gap-filling efforts, he accompanied the next edition of his work with a massive foreword that, in order to contradict the canonicity of these fanworks, actually ended up incorporating an adapted version of their text into his own canon via the other sort of fanwank. "Actually, these sermons in the fanfic of my novel weren't written by my MC, they couldn't have been as my careful textual analysis will show. Rather, they were written by my MC's older brother." It is utterly delightful. If Nicolai were living today he'd totally be a Cass Clare level diva BNF.
There's not as much on gender as I would have liked to see in the book- Birkhold establishes that novels by men and women inspired fanfic, and both men and women wrote fanfic, but otherwise doesn't delve into gendered differences in the results or reception. There was also quite a lot of anonymous and pseudonymous writing going on, both of fanfic and of origfic.
Meanwhile, a sense of the author's moral rights in their characters develops, both as a matter of custom and eventually as a matter of law, and fanfiction of this sort apparently fades into the background of the German literary scene in the 19th century.
My Shabbos reading yesterday. It's a review of the intertwining legal and literary history of 'fan fiction' in late 18th century Germany. Which you may not have realized was a thing but also sort of knew was a thing? I dunno, I had no conceptualization of late 18th Century German Fan Fiction as a thing, but I separately also was fully aware that there was such a thing as the Wertheriaden, spin-offs and fanworks inspired by Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Which of course is precisely the kind of thing the book is about.
I separately knew about some of this legal/literary landscape from Brand Luther, Andrew Pettegree's narrative of the impact of the printing press on the spread of Martin Luther's ideas. Pettegree's work familiarizes the reader with the mechanics of publishing in late medieval Germany, the complicated system of censorship and permission that eroded between Luther's time and the late 18th century as the Holy Roman Empire's legal reach splintered, leaving in its place a wild capitalist enterprise regulated almost entirely by public opinion and communal norms, with copyright-like ideas as a government monopoly ("the publishing privilege") holding very little force.
Into this landscape, with vernacular literacy spreading widely to the masses, little in the way of regulatory authority governing what constituted illegal copying or derivative work, and novels becoming massive pop cultural phenomena (complete with cosplay and fanart) "fan fiction" became a routine part of the commercial publishing landscape. Birkhold's introduction includes a plea to use the ahistorical term fan fiction to describe this work, because under a purely literary analysis it generally complied with the tenets of the standard modern academic definitions of fanfiction: sequels, missing scenes, alternate universe narratives, POV shifted retellings, all looking back to the original canon. For the most part this is fine, and in fact illuminating in what it reveals about the history that led to modern fanfic. But I don't think he confronts deeply enough the distinction that non-commercial vs. commercial fanfiction holds.
There's a weird bit in his conclusion, as he lists topics for future researchers to investigate, where he wonders aloud whether, much as modern fanfic often confronts topics involving societal outsiders and minority groups of all sorts, such a thread of outsider identity existed in late 18th century fan fiction. But of course it didn't in the fan fiction that Birkhold profiled! It was subject to the same market pressures and legal conditions as commercial original fiction in the period.
But otherwise I had few quibbles. It was fascinating in particular to see the various fanwanks of the day: The biggest all seem to center around Christian Friedrich Nicolai, both an author of commercial fanfiction and the creator of source works that themselves inspired fanfiction. On both counts, Nicolai prompted wank. His The Joys of Young Werther, a reworking of Goethe's novel with a happy ending, filled review journals with wanky arguments about the OOCness of his characters and his repudiation of Goethe's original themes... meanwhile doing gangbusters sales.
Meanwhile, his wildly successful Sebaldus Nothanker, itself fanfic of a not-nearly-as-popular novel by Thummel called Wilhelmine, inspired fanworks that claimed to fill in gaps in his novel. Not liking these gap-filling efforts, he accompanied the next edition of his work with a massive foreword that, in order to contradict the canonicity of these fanworks, actually ended up incorporating an adapted version of their text into his own canon via the other sort of fanwank. "Actually, these sermons in the fanfic of my novel weren't written by my MC, they couldn't have been as my careful textual analysis will show. Rather, they were written by my MC's older brother." It is utterly delightful. If Nicolai were living today he'd totally be a Cass Clare level diva BNF.
There's not as much on gender as I would have liked to see in the book- Birkhold establishes that novels by men and women inspired fanfic, and both men and women wrote fanfic, but otherwise doesn't delve into gendered differences in the results or reception. There was also quite a lot of anonymous and pseudonymous writing going on, both of fanfic and of origfic.
Meanwhile, a sense of the author's moral rights in their characters develops, both as a matter of custom and eventually as a matter of law, and fanfiction of this sort apparently fades into the background of the German literary scene in the 19th century.