Expanding Austenland

Expanding Austenland: The Pride and Prejudice Fanfiction Archive explores Jane Austen’s reception in popular culture through an exploration of the ever-expanding terrain of online fanfiction, professionally published (profic) texts, and other intertextual reworkings inspired by the author’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. The book argues that given its pervasiveness, Pride and Prejudice could be usefully considered not as a single novel, but as an entire ‘archive’ of interrelated texts, or as a portal that opens a ‘virtual world’ for readers to expand and explore. By examining the Pride and Prejudice archive, this book analyses the process through which an individual novel can develop a virtual life, or afterlife. The evolving world that is opened by Pride and Prejudice, and extended and enriched through fanfiction, is conceptualised in the monograph as ‘Austenland’. In Expanding Austenland, Áine Madden has gifted fan studies a new, nuancedand much-needed portal into the imaginary world of Pride and Prejudice. From Austenmania to Darcymania – tackling fanfic, profic and transmedia – this book is superbly wide-ranging. Whether discussing the appeal of zombies, the character voices of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, or COVID-related memes, Expanding Austenland is an astute and critically alert guide to the archives and worlds of Jane Austen fans. Matt Hills, Professor of Fandom Studies and author of Fan Cultures Áine Madden’s wonderful and important book is the best explanation we have ever had of Virginia Woolf’s intuition that Jane Austen ‘stimulates us to supply what is not there’. Madden examines the many ways in which readers, viewers, fans, and scholars have filled in the gaps in Austen’s work, or continued it, or riffed upon it, or modernized it, or speculated about it, or drawn comfort from it – right up to a stunning account of the therapeutic role played by Jane Austen in the COVID pandemic. This book is beautifully written, witty, and allusive: exactly the kind of response one would hope to find from a deep encounter with Jane Austen. Darryl Jones, Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture