Abstract
One of the striking features of popular fiction is that at least part of its readership can be identified as fans: deeply knowledgeable and passionately engaged with a book, author or genre, and active participants in the non-academic reception of these cultural products. In his book Popular Fiction: Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, Ken Gelder writes that popular fiction ‘often enjoys a particular kind of reader loyalty, one that can build itself around not just a writer and his or her body of work (which certainly happens) but the entire genre and the culture that imbues it. In other words, popular fiction has fans’ (2004, p. 81). Fan studies have historically recognized ‘textual productivity’ (Fiske 1992)—the creation of zines, newsletters, websites and so on—as a hallmark of engagement; more recently, the opportunities for such activity have been multiplied by the interactive digital spaces of Web 2.0 (Booth 2010; Hills 2013; Jenkins et al. 2013). Review sections on Goodreads and Amazon, book clubs on Twitter, networks of book blogs and comment threads on news articles all provide spaces where readers can write responses to popular fiction. This chapter begins with the position that a reader who creates a textual response to a book, author or genre is a fan, while remaining interested in the way in which different kinds of textual responses can reflect varying levels of investment.
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