The chapter focuses on second journeys — a sub-genre of footsteps travelling — in which a traveler uses a previous travelogue as an explicit map to follow. Affinities with other forms of reiterations such as religious and secular pilgrimages, the Grand Tour, and literary pilgrimages are examined through a focus on issues of nostalgia, oversaturation, and authenticity. Finally, Bea Uusma's The Expedition: My Love Story (2013) is approached as an example of a postmodern, symbiotic second journey. It is argued that it demonstrates a mutualistic form of symbiosis as it re-actualizes the significance of the first journey: the 1897 Swedish Andrée expedition.

Studies have shown a slow but steady change in reading habits among students in Swedish upper secondary schools. The frequency with which they read fiction on a daily basis has decreased and reading comprehension has declined. Consequently, Swedish politicians and school authorities have taken measures to reverse these trends. Fiction reading has traditionally been a part of the Swedish subject, but whereas the course syllabi in the upper secondary school stipulate that fiction be taught, they pay little attention to how. This study examines how teachers describe the process of literary education. In doing so, it suggests that monitoring students is central to teachers’ didactic decisions, and that both teachers and students regard printed books more highly than both audiobooks and e-books. The data was collected using two focus groups interviews with upper secondary school teachers of Swedish, seven female and five male, age 28 to 61. The analysis was grounded in a phenomenographic examination of experience, allowing themes to emerge through iterative coding. The findings show that the teachers’ view on literary education is associated with instrumentality and teacher-centered activities—the discussions circled around practical aspects, with no mention of teaching objectives, approaches, or literary experience.

With focus on queer resistance emanating from place, this article examines Michelle Paver’s 2010 novel Dark Matter: A Ghost Story, set in the 1930s and telling the tale of an all-male expedition to Svalbard. The Arctic as depicted in travelogues and fiction has traditionally been embodied and gendered according to heteronormative models of interpretation as a formidable male adversary or a lethal female seductress; constructions that Paver’s fictional expedition members attempt to enforce as representatives of the norm. However, several aspects of the Arctic blur the boundaries between previously discreet categories, and offer resistance to the expedition’s normative assumptions. With a starting point in Sara Ahmed’s discussions about both spatial and existential orientation in Queer Phenomenology (2006), the article maps how the Arctic is imagined and perceived by Jack Miller, the novel’s protagonist, and how resistive features of the landscape and climate affect his ability to orient himself. Although hoping that the remote Svalbard will constitute a productive testing ground for a particular kind of inter-war, British masculinity, specificities of place represent a threatening transgression of what Jack perceives of as normal, which is brought to a climax by strange events he experiences in the isolated bay where the bulk of the text is set. This article consequently analyzes how the Arctic is initially constructed as a stable place, how geographical particularities then overturn possibilities for Jack’s orientation, and how supernatural occurrences finally violate boundaries between past and present, sane and mad. What Ahmed refers to as ‘queer moments’ that slant that subject’s perception of the world and, from a heteronormative perspective, need to be ‘straightened’ are in the novel produced by the actual as well as the supernatural Arctic. These queer moments distort perspectives, sometimes in highly productive ways, and highlight a continuous, geographically specific resistance to categorization.

This article examines Justin Cronin’s post-apocalyptic novel The Passage (2010), with emphasis on how literal and figurative forms of fragmentation and shifts between temporalities can affect the reader’s storyworld construction. Working from the assumption that expectations connected to genre are a pivotal part of the reader’s storyworld creation, the novel’s temporal settings, the pre-apocalyptic Time Before and the post-apocalyptic Time After, are analyzed with particular attention paid to the ontological distance between readers and characters produced by fragmentation and temporal shifts, to the collapse and reconstitution of cultural knowledge, and to how various text types contribute to a destabilization of narrative authority. The reader’s quest for meaning, collating information from various sources and temporalities to reconstruct or keep track of events, is mirrored by the characters’ world building in the post-apocalypse as they (re)assemble information and cultural knowledge. The storyworld evoked in the mind of the reader, expanding with new details and events, thus finds a concrete parallel in the characters’ (re)construction of the world. Since the latter process is collaborative, with characters having to pool resources to both survive and make sense of the world, and the former occurs within an individual meaning-making process, the organization of the novel occasions a sense of isolation in the reader, mirroring the overarching theme of the narrative.

In recent years, several critics have appropriated and extended Gérard Genette's delineation of the paratext (1987; 1997) in analyses of media specificity, of authoring functions, and of altered reading habits following new modes of textual production. This chapter utilizes the notion of the paratext as a means of addressing how to research particular online texts. It provides an account of one way of conducting such research by focusing on websites that archive fan fiction: online-published, most often pseudonymously authored stories which take a pre-existing fiction as a starting point, and on a few examples stories. It speaks to how Genette's traditional, narratological delineation can be usefully expanded and modified to account for particular methodological challenges when researching the virtual environments and when approaching isolated works within them. In Genette's definition, the paratext constitutes "a threshold … that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back" (Paratexts 2). Despite the seeming concreteness of the threshold image he later goes on to specify that "'[t]he paratext,' properly speaking, does not exist; rather, one chooses to account in these terms for a certain number of practices and effects, for reasons of method and effectiveness” (Paratexts 343). Online publishing entails a particular form of thresholds with websites, online archives, fanfic-specific genres, categorizations and tags representing specific aspects of the paratext. The choice of publication venue, filing options at the selected site, and a host of more or less descriptive labels attached to the work thus signal what type of text form we are concerned with and what genre(s) it belongs to: preliminary indications for how it is to be approached and giving visitors to the sites options to either pursue reading the fanfic, or turn elsewhere. A sustained analysis of different paratextual functions, structuring the site as well as the presentation of fiction, thus profitably accounts for the particularity of the fanfic text form, as well as of the material mediation of the text. 

Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice has been adapted numerous times: as stage productions, TV-series, films and even a musical. It has also occasioned a number of novelistic continuations in the form of sequels, prequels and mash-ups. Each narrative contributes in various ways to the archontic text of Pride and Prejudice (Derecho 2006), or enlarges the storyworld in which audiences are encouraged to immerse themselves (Herman 2003). Fan practices of different kinds illustrate how audience members have cognitively responded to the transmedial storyworld; to its consistent narrative elements, but also to the discrepancies and tensions that arise from conflicting narrative details, chains of events, and characterizations. With a starting point in cognitive theories dealing with Theory of Mind, and particularly the concomitant issue of embedded narratives (Palmer 2004), the article examines fan fiction from three online archives, The Republic of Pemberley, The Austen Interlude, and Archive of Our Own in order to illuminate forms of narrative immersion and to identify the story elements that elicit cognitive response. The Republic is a closely monitored site, i.e. fandom responses to storyworld elements are reigned in and the stories are expected to conform quite closely to themes, characterizations and the style of Austen’s writing. Analyses of narrative details and characterizations that are overrepresented in the stories nevertheless testify to how particular cues in the canon have given rise to intense cognitive and affective engagement. More resistive example stories, published at The Austen Interlude and Archive of Our Own rather work to negotiate and ‘correct’ the canon. Contrastive analyses thus illuminate how fans re-focus the canon archive or enlarge the storyworld.

The article examines forms of communication surrounding the publication and reception of fan fiction: on-line published stories working from an existing fictional universe. At focus are two fanfics that have Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as s starting point, and their publication on the large site FanFiction.net. Already published in their entirety elsewhere, the daily chapter installments of the fanfics are designed to initiate contact with a new group of readers, reciprocated through readers leaving comments. This communication enables examinations of three aspects. Firstly, attention is paid to increasingly private conversations, indicative of a blend between several contemporary social practices. Secondly, the reception of the story’s logic and its downplaying of Austen’s complex renditions of cognitive processes is analyzed. Thirdly, more problematic ramifications of extended author commentary are interrogated, specifically how explicit instructions attempting to guide the approach to and reception of the fanfic results in forms of audience resistance. 

The article appropriates and extends Gérard Genette’s delineation of paratext in analyses of fan fiction, highlighting media specificity, authoring functions, and altered reading habits following new modes of textual production. Online-published, pseudonymously authored fan fictions, starting from an already existing fictional text and therefore overtly intertextual, represent an intermediary stage between print literature and complex, often multimodal, contemporary hypertexts. Through a case study, the article examines paratextual features such as filing options, tags, Author Notes, and an epitextual conversation between the fanfic author and her readers. Many of these features are particular to modes of online publishing and the fanfic text form and fulfill functions which differentiate them from paratexts in printed forms of literature. A thorough analysis of them contributes to a general understanding of the nature and function of the paratext and specifically provides insights into how it can help readers navigate the text form of fan fiction along with the specific affordances of the online creative environment.

This article investigates how the authors of two popular vampire canons, Stephenie Meyer and J. R. Ward, use extratextual spaces such as homepages and Insider Guides to communicate with their fans while simultaneously limiting these fans’ possibilities for concrete involvement. It is argued that Meyer and Ward are engaged in a continuous battle for control over meaning, but that their interaction with their own narratives has close affinities with fannish practices in general. Of particular saliency is Ward’s and Meyer’s insistence on character autonomy, which increases the immediacy of their fictional worlds, but paradoxically weakens the authorial control they otherwise strive to maintain.

“Transmedial Narration and Fan Fiction: The Storyworld of The Vampire Diaries” examines audience participation in transmedia franchises by focusing on unauthorized fan contributions to the transmedial storyworld of The Vampire Diaries in the form of fan fiction. The ‘official’ storyworld is in itself complex as the novels and TV series tell partly different stories. Contradictions and incompatibilities in fact become intrinsic to the storyworld itself, and incorporating unsanctioned products adds to the complexity and diversity of characterizations, plot lines, and themes. At focus in the close reading of four fan fictions is the ways in which the authors negotiate assignations and portrayals of good and evil, and how they criticize cultural norms influencing contemporary romance. It is argued that the concept of storyworld holds great potential for allowing a levelling of hierarchies between sanctioned and unsanctioned products. To re-think different contributions, especially in light of the contemporary stress on audience participation, is productive when seeing fan fiction as part of a larger archive of meaning-making.