“Some people write fanfiction as love letters to canon. This is hate mail”: Negotiating authorship and reader agency in Avengers: Endgame Fix-it Fics.

Abstract

This masters thesis engages with the concepts of the author, the reader, canon, text and paratext, in the context of fanfiction as a literary genre. The study of fanfiction furthers explorations of the concept of the author and reader as seen through a post-structuralist lens following Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s texts regarding authorship as well as a fan theory lens, championed by Kristina Busse and Katherine Tosenberger, in their writings explaining authorial ethos and models of fandom interpretation. To do so, I will be analysing twelve fics that belong to the Fix-It Fic subgenre in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) fandom, specifically relating to the movie Avengers: Endgame (2018). Evaluating these pieces and how their authors use characters, space, storylines, and tropes to challenge preconceptions regarding authorship, intertextuality and reader-writer figures and asks new questions that allow us to adapt theory to contemporary texts.