Francesca Coppa

Francesca Coppa (born March 26, 1970)^[1] is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003). She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works in 2007, originated the idea of interpreting fan fiction as performance, and in 2017, published the first collection of fan fiction designed for teaching purposes. As of 2021, Coppa is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.

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Fandom, at the very basic level, is one of the dominant modes of engagement online. Fandom is something that has become really pervasive. Whatever your interest is you can probably find a community of people into that same thing. We're in a culture that "I read you, you read me." We're all in it together. It's a smaller community, much more personalized. If you want to be in fandom, fandom wants you. Fandom is saying that I really like a much more active participation with my culture. That I don't just see a movie and walk away from it but I wanna discuss it afterwards. I want to write stories it. I want to draw fan art. What we had is a kind of aberrational hundred years of mass media culture where the idea of how to enjoy stories has become really passive and that fan culture and the internet is a return to the kind of previous culture that you saw going through to the end of the nineteenth century where people retold stories to each other because there was no mass media. Fans are drawn to texts and universes that are really complex. Creative worlds where you get a sense that what you saw was only the merest sliver of what was possible. And so one of the things that fans do is like to explore the cultural levels of a universe, adding different kinds of characters, more representative characters: by giving bigger roles to women, by creating different kinds of roles for queer people and racial minorities, for portraying disabled people. So all of these have been really important loci for people to come together and to tell stories that express political values, social values, cultural values that are very different from what the mass-market can offer and so to self identify as a fan is to say that you're interested in engaging culture in this really broad and rich way. Bronies are males fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Generally between the ages of sixteen to twenty-five. And they fiercely love the show. For a man in today's society to tell someone you're a fan of My Little Pony a lot of the times they might cock their head a little bit and be like well what's wrong with you. One of the most appealing things is how much it directly challenges our heteronormative expectations of what it means to be a man. The bronies that I've encountered in real life have mostly been completely earnest, more than ready and willing to talk about their favorite episode, their favorite pony. They want to bro-hoof and they want to welcome you to the herd. Men traditionally have certain societal expectations and really that comes down to a larger problem with homophobia. Andrew W.K's on your side, you're still masculine. I mean who doesn't want to imagine a world with magic and happiness and awesome flying ponies. We've got this very heavily gender segregated world we're living in in America and I think a lot of women are drawn to Transformers because we can step outside that. I write almost entirely in the Transformers fandom. Our canon has one gender, there is one female character. That makes everybody who's not female some sort of gendered- other and I like exploring the idea of what does it mean if you are free of those dynamics that we see so often, like heteronormative. This is sort of a chance to push back against that. You can play around with that idea of who is the receptive one is that really feminized in any way or is the one who's using the male analog part, is that the male, is that the sort of top emotionally in the relationship? To use the idea of domination and control and sort of reinscribe those tropes. It really allows for that kind of thing when we're taking, in a sense, gender norms that we are living with. In fandom, we're a community. We're no longer inscribed in that men do this and women do this. It's everybody is, in a sense, gender equal. Holmies arose out of the Aurora shooting tragedy. After it happened, on tumblr, a group of people in their fan-ish engagement started to post strange photoshop stuff that seemed to be in support of James Holmes, who was the shooter. Within a few hours of that, Buzzfeed posted a listicle about look at all this stuff that the holmies are doing and then suddenly it became a story. Originally it was about six to ten people but the way that it was reported it sounded like there were tens of thousands of people. The resulting media attention meant that more people we're gonna be brought to that space. And the media attention guaranteed that the holmie phenomenon would turn into a trollish phenomenon. One of the great facilitators of community is having an outside. You can only define a community in terms of borders and so, with holmies, they were playing into that trope in an extreme way where only a handful of people would get it. I would argue a lot of trollish behavior is actually a kind of fandom. So where do we draw that line, how do we cordon off what's faniish and what's not? It's really important to consider that spectrum because it's what people do online. Most corporations want to do a kind of branding. They don't want anybody to think about their product in a way that doesn't fit with their take on their product. The fanfiction that they're objecting to the most is the fan fiction that is most protected under law because it's the most transformative. It's a specific part of copyright which basically says that even though somebody has the right to control their intellectual property, the rest of us have certain rights to respond to that, whether it takes the original work and does something different, changes the meaning of it, changes the form of it, as opposed to simply copying. Most fanfic writers are not actually interested in going commercial. They want to share their work for pleasure with other fans and that's the amazing thing that we want to protect. If you're a fan doing this just for love and you get a cease and desist on Warner Brothers letterhead saying you were going to be sued, every violations has a hundred fifty thousand dollar fine. You're like "oh my god, I have to take all my fan fiction off the internet. I have to erase my website. I have to vanish completely." Except, of course, these stories that entertainment corporations tell enter our consciousness. You know, you can't say don't have Harry and Hermoine get together. You can't tell people not to have that thought. That's why fan culture is important. To be able to nurture creativity and share our stories and our art with other people. Why wouldn't we value that? Why wouldn't we let people have this kind of expression? Fan culture really depends both on free speech and fair use. And free speech means sometimes taking speech that you don't like. It challenges people's expectations of what they consider to be acceptable in society. Here's this space with the rules are different, the world is very different from the world I live in and there are set rules and there are set characters and we relate to each other on a different level. And it's something that someone can switch between; different fandoms, different communities, different platforms. It lets many more people have a voice and it lets many people tell stories that would otherwise not get heard.

Biography

Coppa comes from Brooklyn.^[2] She gained her BA from Columbia College, Columbia University (1991), and her MA in English literature from New York University (1993).^[3] Her PhD (1997), also from New York University, was supervised by Una Chaudhuri; her thesis is entitled "Blood and aphorism: Joe Orton, theatre, and the new aristocracy in Great Britain".^[4]

As of 2021, she is a professor of English and director of women's and gender studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she was previously the director of film studies. Her current research interests include British drama, sexuality theory, and media, performance and fan studies.^[3]^[5]

Research and writings

Joe Orton

Coppa is known for her work on Joe Orton,^[6] a British playwright and novelist who came to prominence in 1963 and whose career was cut short by his murder by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in 1967.^[6]^[7] She started to research Orton formally in 1994, based on an archive of materials at Boston University,^[6]^[a] as well as papers that she found Orton's sister had been keeping at home in a cardboard box.^[9] Coppa says that Orton's writings have "challenged and delighted me", citing "the perfection of his word choice, his almost-tangible glee at his own inventiveness, the dead-on rightness of his social anger, his confident assertion of sexual desire." She highlights the rapid pace of social change during his brief career, and states that the "many contradictions" of a man who was "young, working-class, intellectual, homosexual, and 'macho' all at the same time" render Orton "an almost irresistible symbol."^[8]

Many of Orton's early works had never been published, and Coppa edited two of his plays – Fred and Madge (written in 1959) and The Visitors (1961) – for first publication in 1998.^[7]^[8]^[10] In the same year, she edited for first publication his earliest solo novel, Between Us Girls, a parody in diary format written in 1957, and contributed a thirty-page introduction covering his life and career, described by Elaine Showalter as "excellent" and William Hutchings as "useful".^[8]^[10]^[11] Coppa recognizes the bisexual male character Bob Kennedy, who rescues and marries the novel's protagonist Susan, not only as a forerunner to later characters, but also as a model for Orton to reinvent himself as "the successful playwright as swaggering hooligan, ex-convict, working-class tough in a leather jacket".^[10] She also edited and introduced Lord Cucumber and The Boy Hairdresser, two of five short novels he wrote in collaboration with Halliwell, on their first publication in 1999.^[8]^[10]^[12]

She edited Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003), a collection of twelve essays, split into those that address Orton's works as literature and those that attempt to place them in the context of his life. The first section contains essays examining the plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane, The Good and Faithful Servant and The Erpingham Camp, as well as comparisons with Oscar Wilde, Caryl Churchill and even Jane Austen. The second section includes essays focusing on Orton's sexuality, his diaries, and the context in which he wrote,^[13] and includes a contribution by Orton and Halliwell's biographer, Simon Shepherd.^[6]^[13] Coppa wrote the final essay on a 1995 conversation between the actor John Alderton and Orton's sister, who represents his estate.^[13] Tom Smith, in a review for Theatre Journal, describes the collection as an "excellent scholarly resource" with "diverse and interesting" content, but considers that Coppa has not gone far enough towards broadening Orton scholarship, which has focused on a limited selection of his works.^[13]

Other literature, theatre studies

Orton has frequently been likened to Wilde,^[7]^[13] and Coppa has also published on the latter. In 2010, she surveyed representations of Wilde in twentieth-century plays, including Micheál Mac Liammóir's one-man show, The Importance of Being Oscar, drawing attention to a prevalent "revisionist view" of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and concluding that the works are more informative about their own times than that of Wilde. The reviewer Timothy Peltason agrees with her conclusions but points out that Coppa also considers the works from a "somewhat limiting" current perspective, holding the works to "un-Wildean standards of accuracy and fairness in representation".^[14] Her other publications on Wilde include an introduction to The Importance of Being Earnest (2015),^[15] a "clearly written" chapter on performance theory,^[16] and an "insightful" article on teaching Lady Windermere's Fan, in which she states that in her experience, Wilde needs to be taught as "melodramatist, modernist, and postmodernist all at once".^[17]^[18] She has also published on the early plays of Harold Pinter^[19] and queer sexuality in Brideshead Revisited.^[20]

Coppa co-edited Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2008), with Lawrence Hass and James Peck, a collection that includes both practical magicians and researchers on stage magic.^[21] She contributed an essay about the low status accorded to the female assistant compared with the male conjuror.^[22]

Fan studies

In 2007, with Naomi Novik, Rebecca Tushnet and others, Coppa was a founder of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit body that aims "to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures";^[23] she served on the board until 2012, and remains an emeritus director.^[24]^[25] The fandom expert Henry Jenkins highlights her work on challenging intellectual property rights as applied to fanworks.^[26] She is particularly known for her work documenting the history of the fanvid – which she defines as "a visual essay" that intends "to make an argument or tell a story"^[27] and uses the accompanying music track as "an interpretive lens to help the viewer to see the source text differently"^[28] – and has published on vidding as a women's practice, distinct from other forms of fan-created videos.^[26]^[27]^[28] In 2012, she co-edited a special issue of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures entitled "Fan/Remix Video", with Julie Levin Russo.^[29] Her highest-cited research paper is on the history of American media fandom,^[b] which seeks to differentiate it from general science fiction fandom,^[30] and has been criticized for not covering non-western fandoms.^[31] In a 2006 paper, Coppa analyzed fan fiction using performance theory, positing that fan fiction writers respond to "dramatic, not literary, modes of storytelling" and so should be assessed by "performative rather than literary criteria"; she developed the theory to address common criticisms of fan fiction, including its focus on the physical, its repetitious and relatively ephemeral nature, and its requirement for an audience.^[30]^[32]^[33]^[34] In 2014, she wrote a response to Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington's 2007 dismissive description of first-wave fan studies as the "Fandom Is Beautiful" era, entitled "Fuck Yeah, Fandom Is Beautiful".^[35]

Coppa edited a collection of fan fiction, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, published by University of Michigan Press in 2017 and intended as a college-level teaching text.^[36]^[37] Describing her motivations for creating the collection, Coppa states: "I want people to see that fanfiction is legal – a transformative fair use that can be published and sold in certain contexts – and also that it's an art."^[38] Jenkins describes The Fanfiction Reader as "the first anthology of fan fiction for use in the classroom", and praises Coppa and University of Michigan Press for their "courage" in tackling what he refers to as "taboos" relating to publishing fan fiction.^[26] Stephanie Burt points out that the many previous academic works on fan fiction did not include extended examples and "a printed collection of the stuff, from a university press, with no serial numbers removed" would probably not have been possible as recently as 2012 because of the threat of legal action, attributing the change at least in part to the advocacy of OTW.^[36]

The Fanfiction Reader assembles short, non-adult-rated stories covering a range of fan fiction genres, based in widely known American or British sources,^[26]^[36]^[37] which Burt describes as Coppa's idea of "good on-ramps to the phenomenon".^[36] Coppa organizes the anthology as a "modern Canterbury Tales", with the chapter titles referencing this work.^[37] The authors include Astolat, KaydeeFalls, Rheanna, Speranza and Yahtzee,^[36]^[39] and the stories range in date between 1998 and 2017.^[37] Coppa provides a general overview of fan fiction, including five different definitions,^[40] together with brief introductions to each fandom, which include Buffy, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, James Bond, Star Trek and Supernatural, as well as real-person fiction, which treats real celebrities as if they were fictional characters.^[36]^[37] She also locates the stories within their context, emphasizing the communal and collaborative nature of fannish writing, and includes multiple "meta" stories, which comment on fan writing itself.^[26]^[37] Burt, in a review for The New Yorker, describes most of the stories in the collection as "thoughtful, and delightful",^[36] but notes that fan fiction encountered in such a book is divorced from the actual experience of finding and reading fan fiction.^[36] Lorraine M. Dubuisson, in a review for Transformative Works and Cultures, recommends the collection for teaching purposes, but highlights the relatively limited focus, which excludes non-western sources and sexually explicit works.^[37] Burt describes The Fanfiction Reader as accessible and a "good first encounter with the genus",^[36] and Dubuisson generally agrees but questions whether Coppa's background information will prove adequate to allow readers to understand stories based in multiple-season television series.^[37] The book won the Media and Cultural Studies category of the Association of American Publishers's Prose Awards in 2018.^[41]

Selected publications

Books

Francesca Coppa, Vidding: A History (University of Michigan Press; 2022) (ISBN 9780472038527)

Edited books

Francesca Coppa, ed. The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press; 2017) (ISBN 9780472073481)
Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Haas, James Peck, eds. Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan; 2008) (ISBN 978-0-230-60788-0)
Francesca Coppa, ed. Joe Orton: A Casebook (Routledge; 2003) (ISBN 9780815336273)
Joe Orton. Fred and Madge and The Visitors (Francesca Coppa, ed.) (Nick Hern Books; 1998) (ISBN 1 85459 354 4)
Joe Orton. Between Us Girls (Francesca Coppa, ed.) (Nick Hern Books; 1998) (ISBN 1 85459 374 9)

Research papers

Francesca Coppa (2008). "Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding", Transformative Works and Cultures 1 doi:10.3983/twc.2008.044
Francesca Coppa. "A brief history of media fandom", in Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse, eds, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (McFarland; 2006) (ISBN 9780786426409)
Francesca Coppa. "Writing bodies in space: Media fanfiction as theatrical performance", in Hellekson & Busse, 2006 and reprinted in Hellekson, Busse, eds, The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (University of Iowa Press; 2014) (ISBN 9781609382278)

References and notes

^ Coppa dates her earliest scholarly work on Orton to 1987.^[8]
^ "A brief history of media fandom" (2006) had 405 citations in Google Scholar in a search on February 2, 2021.

^ Coppa, Francesca, Library of Congress (retrieved February 3, 2021)
^ Jesse Walker (August/September 2008). "Remixing Television: Francesca Coppa on the vidding underground", Reason 40
^ ^a ^b Francesca Coppa Archived April 19, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, Muhlenberg College (retrieved February 1, 2021)
^ Blood and aphorism: Joe Orton, theatre, and the new aristocracy in Great Britain, WorldCat (retrieved February 1, 2021)
^ Francesa Coppa (May 22, 2017). About, personal website (retrieved February 2, 2021)
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Matt Cook (2008). "Orton in the Archives", History Workshop Journal (66): 163–179 JSTOR 25473012
^ ^a ^b ^c Stephen Grecco (1999). "Review: Fred & Madge; The Visitors: Two Plays by Joe Orton", World Literature Today 73: 336 doi:10.2307/40154757
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Francesca Coppa. Joe Orton and Me: Dr Francesa Coppa–Academic, Joe Orton Online (retrieved February 2, 2021)
^ Francesca Coppa. "Introduction", in Francesca Coppa, ed., Joe Orton: A Casebook, pp. 9–10 (Routledge; 2003) (ISBN 9780815336273)
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Elaine Showalter (1998). "Miss Fleur gave me the most awful restyle", London Review of Books 20(24)
^ William Hutchings (2000). "Review: Between Us Girls by Joe Orton", World Literature Today 74: 160 doi:10.2307/40155407
^ The boy hairdresser: and, Lord Cucumber: two novels, WorldCat (retrieved February 2, 2021)
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Tom Smith (2004). "Review: Joe Orton: A Casebook by Francesca Coppa", Theatre Journal 56: 529–530 JSTOR 25069511
^ Timothy Peltason (2010). "Review: Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend, edited by Joseph Bristow", Victorian Studies 52: 339–342 doi:10.2979/vic.2010.52.2.339
^ The Importance of Being Earnest: Revised Edition, Bloomsbury Publishing (retrieved February 2, 2021)
^ Anya Clayworth (2005). "Nineteenth-century sensations and advances", The Wildean 26: 75–78 JSTOR 45269262
^ Colin Carman (2010). "Review: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde by Philip E. Smith, II", Rocky Mountain Review 64: 99–101 JSTOR 25677063
^ Annette Federico (2010). "Teaching Oscar Wilde", English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 53: 101–106 Project MUSE 367340
^ Nyusztay, Iván (2015). "Infinite Responsibility and the Third in Emmanuel Levinas and Harold Pinter". Literature and Theology. 29 (2): 153–165. doi:10.1093/litthe/fru035. JSTOR 43664466.
^ Martin B. Lockerd (2018). "Decadent Arcadias, Wild(e) Conversions, and Queer Celibacies in Brideshead Revisited", MFS Modern Fiction Studies 64: 242 doi:10.1353/mfs.2018.0019
^ Wally Smith (2015). "Technologies of stage magic: Simulation and dissimulation", Social Studies of Science 45: 319–343 JSTOR 43829028
^ Christopher Pittard. "Conjuring Dickens: Magic, Intellectual Property, and The Old Curiosity Shop" in Joachim Frenk, Lena Steveker, eds, Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change, p.179 (Cornell University Press; 2019) Project MUSE 63933 (ISBN 9781501736285)
^ Organization for Transformative Works, Organization for Transformative Works (retrieved February 4, 2021)
^ Emerita Directors, Organization for Transformative Works (retrieved February 1, 2021)
^ Retired Personnel (November 10, 2019), "Ten Years of AO3: Francesca Coppa", Organization for Transformative Works (retrieved February 5, 2021)
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Henry Jenkins (September 14, 2017). "Bringing Fan Fiction into the Classroom: An Interview with Francesca Coppa (Part One)", Confessions of an Aca-fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins (retrieved February 2, 2021)
^ ^a ^b Stevens describes Coppa as "a key figure in this second wave of writing on vids" (p. 30). E. Charlotte Stevens. "Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the Vid", in Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use, pp. 30, 32 (Amsterdam University Press; 2020) doi:10.5117/9789462985865_ch01 (ISBN 9789048537105)
^ ^a ^b Suzanne Scott. Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry, p. 121 (NYU Press; 2019) Project MUSE 76066 (ISBN 9781479822966)
^ "Fan/Remix Video," special issue of TWC guest edited by Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College, and Julie Levin Russo, Brown University, Transformative Works and Cultures 9
^ ^a ^b Alicia Verlager (2009). "Review: Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays by Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse", Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 20: 147–149 JSTOR 24352326
^ Rukmini Pande. Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race, p. 26 (University of Iowa Press; 2018) doi:10.2307/j.ctv7r43q4.6 Project MUSE 62687 (ISBN 9781609386191)
^ Kristina Busse. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities, pp. 78, 150, 203 (University of Iowa Press; 2017) Project MUSE 55237 (ISBN 9781609385156)
^ Megan Lynn Isaac (2018). "A Character of One's Own: The Perils of Female Authorship in the Young Adult Novel from Alcott to Birdsall", Children's Literature 46: 150 doi:10.1353/chl.2018.0007 Project MUSE 695858
^ Jonathan Gray. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, pp. 159–160 (NYU Press; 2010) Project MUSE 10587 (ISBN 9780814732342)
^ Suzanne Scott. "A fangirl's place is in the resistance: Feminism and fan studies", in Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry, pp. 47–48 (NYU Press; 2019) Project MUSE 76066 (ISBN 9781479878352)
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Stephanie Burt (August 23, 2017). "The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction", The New Yorker
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Lorraine M. Dubuisson (2018). "The fanfiction reader: Folk tales for the digital age, by Francesca Coppa", Transformative Works and Cultures 28 doi:10.3983/twc.2018.1322
^ Claudia Rebaza (September 28, 2017). "Support the OTW by Reading!", Organization for Transformative Works (retrieved February 3, 2021)
^ Contents, in Francesca Coppa, ed., The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press; 2017) (ISBN 9780472073481)
^ Ann K. McClellan. Sherlock's World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC's Sherlock, pp. 20–22 (University of Iowa Press; 2018) Project MUSE 62512 (ISBN 9781609386177)
^ 2018 Winners, Association of American Publishers (retrieved February 2, 2021)