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Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture . By Mark Duffett . New York : Bloomsbury Academic , 2013. 342 pp. ISBN 978-1-441-16693-7
Popular Music Fandom: Identities, Roles and Practices . Edited by Mark Duffett . New York : Routledge , 2014. 233 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-50639-7
Reviews
In 1992, Lisa Lewis edited The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, an anthology that brought together disparate work on enthusiastic audiences of music, film and media, and captured a significant moment in the maturation of fan studies. At the time, scholarship on fandom was limited and not readily identified in conventional indexes of academic research. One might find passing interpretations of fannish consumption in post-war mass culture critique, Birmingham School scholarship on popular culture, or celebrity studies. And ethnographic research on readers and television viewers in the 1980s had only begun to offer more specific analyses. Lewis' book was one of the first to envision this dispersed work as part of a lively, serious and unified field of enquiry.
Today, enriched by nearly two decades of monographs on fan cultures, theoretical analysis of fandom as a concept, and journals dedicated to fan scholarship (Transformative Works, Journal of Fan Studies, Participations), fan studies now has an institutional history, complete with reigning paradigms, accepted methods and competing theories. The field has also changed thanks to the digital age, which has weakened the reign of the mass culture industry. Niche marketing, social networking and digital archiving have made fan clubs, fanzines, autograph-seeking and bootlegging markers of a new past. Mark Duffett, an established researcher of Elvis fan culture, has stepped into this moment as the field's documentarian and advocate; besides editing a 2013 issue of Popular Music and Society dedicated to fandom, he has published two new books that seek to stage fan studies for a new generation of students and scholars.
Popular Music Fandom, an edited anthology of essays from a conference held in 2010 at the University of Chester (Duffett's home institution), represents an intentional updating of Lewis' work. Not only is Popular Music Fandom similarly published by Routledge, but it includes essays by Fred Vermoral and Joli Jensen, both...