Abstract
In this comparison of portraits of authorial anxiety, I focus on contemporary attitudes to fan fiction and on discussions of authors in Imperial Rome (notably Galen and Martial) to consider the assumptions of textuality that frame imagined textual abuse. Revealed are parallel discourses for different concerns—for the reader as a potentially ill-educated consumer and the text as an object in the ancient world; in the contemporary world, for the author's personal violation and the text as an agent within readerly experience. I discuss how fan fiction's lack of commercial publication is used to distinguish it from other contemporary literature within this framework. Fan fiction's noncommercial publication can thus be appreciated as a marginalizing act in itself.
Highlights
When studying the ancient world, one of the most frustrating things can be the lack of evidence
I am concerned with the anxieties different models of textuality allow for between the high Roman Empire and the contemporary world, and the way fanfiction today is able to operate as an abuse of text distinct in social position and assumed value from other literary practice
As a constant shared by any work of literature within a literary culture, textuality is a concept which does not require a great breadth of evidence to examine in detail
Summary
When studying the ancient world, one of the most frustrating things can be the lack of evidence.
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