David A. Brewer

Another entry in the history of fanfic, covering various “further adventures of” popular characters during the period. The detailed exegesis in the main chapters is very inside baseball; if you don’t already know a lot about Richardson’s Pamela, Tristam Shandy, etc. it will be very hard to follow. But the introduction and conclusion are particularly useful contributions to theorizing the intersection of authorial property and popular insistence on investigating what happened next, given that Brewer’s period covers the first real flowering of copyright. His discussion of how authors tried to maintain priority of interpretation is useful and still resonates, as does his investigation of the imagined communities – and real divergences – among audiences united only by their love for a particular fiction.… (meer)