Fan Fiction and New Adult Fiction: Immediacy in 'Too Late Capitalism' or Levelling the Playing Field?

As capitalism shifts from product manufacturing to the rapid, tech-monopolised velocity of circulation, cultural production shifts with it. Once localised to subcultural, non-profit digital repositories like Archive of Our Own (AO3), Fanfiction.com/Fanfiktion.de and Wattpad, books based on fanfiction are now a multi-million-industry. The style of fanfiction and New Adult/Young Adult fiction, which is often steeped in fanfiction traditions, has been heavily criticised for their tropes and by-the-number plots, which can be viewed as a type of so-called ‘immediacy style’ (Kornbluh 2024).  Are fanfiction and New Adult fiction truly symptomatic of this style, i.e., a lack of artistic distance on the author’s part in favour of unfiltered instantaneity which collapses public space into private experience and kills political imagination? Or are fanfiction and New Adult novels a radical, grassroots democratisation, levelling the literary playing field and thus creating a joint public space and political imagination precisely because of their stylistic choices?

Drawing on examples of popular fanfiction that were later successfully monetised (such as Alchemised based on the Fanfiction Manacled by SenLinYu (who uses their AO3 handle as their pen name) and E.L.James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (originally a Twilight Fanfiction called Master of the Universe)) as well as academic texts originating in fan studies, we will question whether the relentless cycle of (digital) text production in fanfiction spaces annihilates critical representation to reduce prose to mere algorithmic content-bait or if the elimination of industrial middlemen sparks vital spaces for immediate, real-time community solidarity. We will also investigate the development from hiding the fanfiction origins of literary output to the now increasingly popular approach of using that same origin as a marketing asset.

Moreover, we will track the corporate monetisation of what once was literary subversion. Does mainstream institutional absorption sanitise radical, anti-market fiction, or does it effectively weaponise corporate infrastructure to secure immediate financial autonomy for marginalised creators and, more importantly, marginalised communities?

Secondary Literature

Coppa, Francesca. The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age. University of Michigan Press, 2017.

Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2013.

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. MIT Press, 2016.

Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse (Eds.). The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. University of Iowa Press, 2014.

Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Verso, 2024.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.