Fanaticism, yes!: literary fan cultures of the early twentieth century

The fast-growing field of fan studies has a literary history problem. From the disciplines seminal works of the early 1990s to its recent, media attention-garnering popular scholarship, fan studies has repeated one creation myth time and again. Fandom, this myth tells us, might have gained popularity in the 1960s as female audiences mimeographed and mailed each other Star Trek fanzines, but it owes its creation to the male-dominated world of the 1930s science fiction pulps.But this history neglects the bigger picture of fan cultures in the early twentieth century, and it erases the many women writers, readers, and film fans who transformed American culture by their participation in early forms of fandom. My dissertation examines the work of popular women writers working in middlebrow and regional forms, and the fan responses to such work, in order to present a counter-history of fan culturesone that returns women to center stage, while arguing for a more complex, less hierarchical understanding of authorship, genre, and the American literary marketplace in the modernist era.