Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Fan Studies

This book is a study of how transfictional and transmedia storytelling emerges in the nineteenth century and how the period's receptive practices anticipate the receptive practices of fandom and transmedia storytelling franchises in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The central claim  is that the serialized, periodical, and dramatic media environment of the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century in Great Britain trained audiences to perceive the continuous identity of characters and worlds across disparate texts, illustrations, plays, and songs by creators other than the earliest originating author. The book contributes to fan studies, transmedia studies, and nineteenth-century periodical studies while also interrogating the nature of fictional character.

This book argues that fans¿ creative works form a cognitive system; fanfic, fanvids, and gifs are not simply evidence of thinking, but acts of thinking. Drawing on work in cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive philosophy, and psychology¿particularly focused on 4-E cognition, which rejects Cartesian dualism¿this project demonstrates that cognition is an embodied, emotional, and distributed act that emerges from fans¿ interactions with media texts, technological interfaces, and fan collectives. This mode of textual engagement is deeply physical, emotional, and social and is enacted through fanworks. By developing a theory of critical closeness, this book proposes a methodology for fruitfully putting cognitive science in conversation with fan studies.

It represents a large-scale attempt to incorporate adaptation and translation studies into comics studies, through a lens of fan studies (used to examine both the American and German fan communities, as well as the work of Don Rosa).