Fifteen Questions: Anna Wilson on Fanfiction, Medieval Literature, and Interdisciplinarity

Anna Wilson is an Assistant Professor of English. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: In both your scholarly research and your teaching career, you have explored the intersections of medieval literature and fanfiction. How did you come to see these two areas as connected?

AW: I actually did my undergraduate degree in classics, and towards the end of my degree, I got very interested in late antique writers who were beginning to get further and further away from the culture of Imperial Rome, but were increasingly rewriting and transforming their work. And I was reading fanfiction — just as a fan for fun — and I began to see that there was a similar kind of culture of rewriting and transformation using some of the same techniques. And that resemblance just kind of stayed with me. I didn’t take it up in my scholarship for quite a long time, but as I moved and got more and more interested in later and later literature, I continued to be interested in what is called “reception” in that field — which means the receiving and the transformation of texts, hundreds and even thousands of years after their original composition. Then I had the opportunity to bring fanfiction in more explicitly as I started to work on reception in my Ph.D., and that’s what brought me here.

FM: What is your favorite fanfiction trope?

AW: I’m very interested in coffee shop AUs at the moment.

The coffee shop AU — as you know, but the readers may not — is when all of the characters from the original text get reimagined in a very mundane setting, typically a coffee shop. But I also love it when they’re reimagined into other mundane settings — you know, workplaces. I like it when people use their real knowledge of their workplace to bring it in. And so, there’s some incredible ones about people working in museums and libraries and aquariums and all kinds of things. But I can't read the academia ones because those weird me out.

FM: Some people argue that fanfiction doesn’t count as “literature.” What do you think drives that mindset, and how would you respond to that idea?

AW: I think that idea comes from a lot of places, and I think actually my attitudes toward this have changed a little bit over time. I used to say, “No, of course fanfiction counts as literature. It’s art. People are writing it,” and I still think that to an extent. I don’t think there’s anything inherently better or worse about fanfiction than other kinds of literature, which is usually what people mean when they ask that question. But I do think that sometimes people like to use fanfiction as a valuable space for doing things that people don’t necessarily think of literature as doing.

It’s a place where people learn to write, or experiment with new things, and make friends. I think there’s real value in that.

FM: What is a common misconception about medieval literature?

AW: There’s lots of common misconceptions about medieval literature: that it’s boring, that it’s full of men fighting other men.

I think people are frightened of medieval literature, and I often have students in class where they’ve had to take the class for a requirement. Then they finish the class and go, “This stuff is incredible. What else can I read? I can’t believe that I avoided reading this.”

There’s a lot more medieval literature about a bigger variety of things than people think. There’s a romance about a trans knight, which I often teach, which people — their minds are blown by how relevant to modern trans experience it feels and how much the poem is kind of thinking through ideas about nature versus nurture and what it means to feel a different way from the people around you.

FM: Are there any lesser known writers from the medieval period whose work you believe deserves more attention?

AW: Well, yes, but they are generally more in terms of works than authors, because there’s a lot of anonymous works from the Middle Ages. The text I just mentioned is called “Le Roman de Silence,” or “The Romance of Silence.”

There’s also a fantastic author called Marie de France who also wrote in French, but her stories are very widely available, and they’re really fun, weird, little fairy stories and romances about mostly women having weird adventures.

There’s a woman who gets locked away in a tower and wishes for a lover. A hawk shows up and turns into a man and they become lovers. Then her evil husband catches him, and she climbs out of the tower and follows her hawk-boyfriend to a fairy kingdom. And it’s all very exciting. There’s one with a werewolf. It’s great.

FM: Fanfiction has often been described as a predominantly female-driven space. How do you think gender dynamics shape the way fanfiction is written, consumed, and perceived?

AW: I often will go back to the beginning of the early novel and the rise of copyright in the 18th century.

When copyright comes to exist, you get a division of creative activity between illegal creative activity — which people can’t make a profit off of — and legal creative activity. That comes to be gendered almost immediately, because you have a public sphere where people are encouraged to publish, and you have a domestic private sphere where people are just playing. The domestic private sphere is increasingly thought of as the domain of women and children. What we now think of as kind of fanfiction and fan-ish play becomes something which is appropriate to women and young people.

Fast forward 150 years, you’ve still got this marginal, unauthorized space where young people and women find it easier to build their own community than to try and break into mainstream publishing, which is still quite sexist and ageist — less so now — but up until recently also enforced various kinds of misogynist narratives, or wasn’t really open to certain kinds of storytelling. Fanfiction, I think, has stayed this space where people have been able to explore women’s perspectives, LGBTQ perspectives, in ways there wasn’t really space for in mainstream publishing.

FM: You teach an English course called “Medieval Fanfiction.” What do you personally hope that your students take away from approaching medieval literature through the lens of fanfiction?

AW: What I really hope is that students come to the class excited by that juxtaposition, either because they know a little bit about medieval literature and they want to think about it through fanfiction, or because they know a lot about fanfiction and they want to see where that takes them.

A lot of the students who take that class are actually STEM students. This is sometimes the only literature class that they take, but they know a lot about fanfiction, and that slowly starts to come out over the course of the class.

I want to help them translate that experience into the classroom and show them how they can apply it to other kinds of literature. They already possess all of this proficiency in thinking about things like reception and transformation, which have these literary names, but which they have effectively been studying for quite a few years and thinking quite a lot about. I want them to value that knowledge. And if they come to value fanfiction as an art form, that's great too. I see the two things as sort of interrelated.

FM: Fanfiction thrives on the dynamic interplay between writers and readers in vibrant communities. How have these communities influenced your own experiences as both fanfiction writer and scholar?

AW: I have been a member of fan communities since I was 15 or 16 — more than half my life — and they’ve been immensely important for my formation as a reader and my happiness as a person. They've been a really important source of comfort, kindness, and learning for me, and I try and be mindful of that debt that I owe to them. They’ve also been important to my scholarship, because I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what fanfiction was. How do you define fanfiction in a way that makes it meaningful to talk about it in relation to medieval authorship? Because people often say, “Well, fanfiction is stories that are not written with copyright approval,” but there was no copyright in the Middle Ages. So then, is everything fanfiction? That’s not a very useful definition to me.

I began to think of fanfiction as, specifically, fiction by fans, for fans. So the community becomes an incredibly important part of the literature.

FM: Any words of advice for prospective English concentrators?

AW: A lot of the students come to Harvard very concerned about their future. This is a moment of real economic anxiety and precarity. Generally, my message to students is — there is no job for life anymore.

I think that the idea that an English degree is somehow a less good bet to a job is completely wrong-headed. What we offer are incredibly important skills and also access to a cultural heritage which will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life. Books will always be there for you. You will always be able to read and learn, and taking some time to learn how to do that, and to be assisted into reading some stuff that might be a little more difficult to approach on your own, is such a good investment for your life.

And also, we’re fun and we have candy.

FM: What is your favorite medieval text, either to teach or to read?

AW: My favorite medieval text is called “The Book of Margery Kempe.” I have read and taught it many times.

It is the 14th-century memoirs of a woman who had a mental breakdown after her first child, and then had a very intense series of religious experiences. She continued to be married and to have children — she had 14 pregnancies — but she then became a wandering teacher later in her life.

She was a very intense person, and her memoir is such a fascinating and strange insight into a fascinating and strange life, but it also has these beautiful sections where she’s having visions of having these domestic, intimate moments with Jesus and with the Virgin Mary.

I never get tired of reading it. I find something new every time I read it.

FM: What tropes do you see in medieval literature?

AW: My favorite trope in medieval literature is when authors say at the beginning of their stories that they’re going to tell you a story that they read out of a book, but they’ve entirely made up the book and they’re just pretending that it existed to make the story sound older and more authoritative than it is. I find that really funny.

FM: Your scholarly work spans interests ranging from classical studies to hermeneutics, fanfiction to queer theory. How do you hope your research contributes to the way we think about storytelling, both in the past and in the present?

AW: I would really like to pull together the fields of literary study and cultural studies a little more. I often see literature scholars asking questions about audiences and having conversations about how people read and what it means to love a text. Those questions are also talked about in fan studies and cultural studies, often in different and very interesting ways.

I’m an interdisciplinarian. I want to read widely instead of deeply, because one doesn’t have the time to do both, unfortunately. I’m interested in noticing echoes in conversations that are happening around different kinds of media that don’t often get discussed together, and kind of saying, “Oh, maybe these two groups should talk to each other.”

FM: What is next on your reading list?

AW: I've been reading the Golden Age mysteries of an author called Ngaio Marsh, who was a New Zealand writer who’s a contemporary with Agatha Christie, who was very prolific and successful, but isn’t as well known now as Agatha Christie. And I’m really enjoying those.

FM: What advice would you give to your past self?

AW: Go on antidepressants earlier. That’s it.

FM: Lastly, what is bringing you joy right now, professionally, personally or creatively?

AW: I’m teaching my medieval fanfiction class, I’m teaching a graduate class on queer theory that I love teaching, and I’m excited. Both of those classes are so fun, and I get to meet such interesting people when I teach them, and I’m just really excited to meet this semester’s groups and start working with them.

— Associate Magazine Editor Elane M. Kim can be reached at elane.kim@thecrimson.com.