Fannish Folklore: Feminist Fan‐Fiction Retellings of Germanic Fairy Tales By Jaime W.Roots, PeterLang. 2022. pp. 240. $78.80 (paperback and ebook)

“Everyone is a storyteller”: so begins Jaime W. Roots's monograph Fannish Folklore (2). As the practice of writing original stories that borrow from pre-published works, fan fiction has often been called a “democratic genre” (as in Sheenagh Pugh's The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, Seren, 2005), one that allows non-professionals to participate in storytelling. Much of the critique of mass media, most iconically by Frankfurt School scholars Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, has been premised upon the one-to-many structure of broadcast systems. Only a small portion of the population could be involved in the industrial production of culture, and thus, storytelling of the 20th and 21st centuries became the province of a cultural elite. This narrative describes not only technological but also economic and cultural changes inherent in the industrial practices of media corporations and copyright law. Particularly in America, the size and scope of media industries in the 20th century quickly dwarfed the resources of independent publishers and producers, and extensions to copyright law granted longer and longer periods of monopoly over creative properties than ever before. As a result, media conglomerates exert outsized control over the cultural field. So even if at some inherent level “everyone is a storyteller,” the stories that dominate the public imagination come from corporations. In this spirit a number of scholars, perhaps most iconically Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers (Routledge, 2012), have argued that fan fiction represents a return to pre-industrial storytelling cultures. Both can be characterized by communal storytelling that preceded or displaces copyright control over narratives, small-scale circulation of stories within responsive communities, and the strong participation of girls and women. Roots extends this scholarly tradition in Fannish Folklore by focusing on fan fiction about Grimms’ Märchen written only in German on the fan webpage FanFiction.de. The scope of Roots's study thereby offers possibly the most direct comparison between pre-industrial fairy tale storytelling cultures and a contemporary digital fan fiction community. It also responds to the urging of many fan studies scholars, myself included, for study of the particularities of specific local and regional fandoms in languages other than English within the broad scope of transnational fandom. The book is divided into chapters on thematic lines, which reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the endeavor, bridging German studies, fairy tale studies, fan studies, and new media studies. Chapters 1 through 3 focus on the online environment, including digital misogynist harassment and a comparison between the digital and Habermasian public sphere. Chapters 4 through 7 more strongly emphasize the fairy tale tradition and the broader fan fiction context. The book includes original quantitative data about FanFiction.de that could be of use to other scholars, but it is strongest when it most directly engages in close reading of individual fan stories. This occurs in chapters 5 and 7, which respectively discuss “Briar Rose”/”Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410) and “Little Red Riding Hood” (ATU 333) rewrites in relation to feminism as well as the dialogue between the Grimms’ and fan versions of “Hansel and Gretel” (ATU 327A) and “The Little Goose Girl” (ATU 923). These provide a glimpse of the spectrum of fan fairy tale interpretations that could prove valuable from both a fan studies and folklore studies perspective. The book also includes extensive summaries, a common pitfall of interdisciplinary work. Because interdisciplinary projects find audiences in several fields, they often must provide enough context to allow everyone to “catch up” and reach the same conclusions. This process makes the book a strong contender for classroom use. It can helpfully introduce students of German studies to fan studies and fairy tale studies and vice versa. Likewise, scholars who wish to understand the fruitful overlap between these fields will find an extensive explanation of what fan studies has to learn from fairy tale studies and why scholars of the Grimms’ tradition within the German context may benefit from understanding the place of these ancient tales within modern digital culture. However, more advanced scholars and those familiar with the cross pollination between fans and folklore may find that these extended summaries take up too great a proportion of the overall text and often crowd out more potentially interesting avenues of new inquiry. In particular, although the book's uniqueness lies in the intersection between fan fiction, the Grimms’ German storytelling tradition, and contemporary digital culture, these themes could be more developed. For example, although it is noted that participants report finding German-language spaces more comfortable and English-language spaces less community-oriented, this idea is not deeply worked through or theorized. Given the extensive documentation of community structures within even very large English-language fandom by forty years of scholars, Roots's assertion that communities larger than 500 people cannot function does not hold up (75). Likewise, Roots's study does not explain why the German-language community on FanFiction.de could not make use of the Archive of Our Own or FanFiction.net. Although headquartered in the USA, both enable stories to be written in and commented on in numerous languages, including German. The corpus used by Roots on FanFiction.de consists of 161 stories, while the Archive of Our Own currently hosts 84 stories in German under the tag “Märchen.” Although this corpus is half the size, it nevertheless suggests there may be a stronger significance to the preference of FanFiction.de participants not for a German-language space but for a German-language-only space, a preference not shared by all German speakers who participate in fairy tale fandom. Further, one of the most uniquely German observations in the book deals with the usage of Turkish-German dialect and its implications for the representation of race (172–173). Roots argues that characters’ use of Turkish-German dialect as an expression of anger is linked to racist stereotypes associated with Turkish immigrants. This idea could productively be expanded to comment upon how modern fan authors’ exploration of Grimms’ tales may reiterate the nation-defining project of the original authors. However, Roots's consideration of this phenomenon takes up only about one page. There is no discussion of the use of Turkish-German dialect in contemporary German-speaking contexts or how race and migration play into contemporary German politics. Although scholarship on race in fandom has flourished in recent years in work by scholars including Rukmini Pande and Rebecca Wanzo, none of it is cited or discussed. Likewise, although there is a detailed and intriguing exploration of FanFiction.de fans’ use of “Little Red Riding Hood” tropes to engage with contemporary (and historical) realities of rape culture, this section would have benefitted from a more thorough comparison with the long tradition of similar feminist reworkings, most famously by Angela Carter, in order to elucidate both what is uniquely contemporary and uniquely German about the FanFiction.de material. If it is not uniquely contemporary, then it is unclear what distinguishes it from these earlier practices, and if it is not uniquely German, then it is unclear why it cannot be fully explained by other scholarly works on feminist fan fiction in the English-language context, for instance scholarship by Francesca Coppa. As a result, this book takes up the much-needed work of examining local iterations of transnational fandom but does not fully exploit the unique contingencies of its German-language context. This remains a fertile path for future scholarship that Roots's forthcoming work may be well positioned to explore.

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