Popular Media Cultures Fans, Audiences and Paratexts

Popular Media Cultures seeks to explore the relationship between audiences and media texts, their paratexts and interconnected ephemera, and the related cultural practices that add to and expand the narrative worlds with which fans engage. The book discusses how audiences make meaning out of established media texts such as Doctor Who, Made in Chelsea and Star Trek, the Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter franchises, and infamous examples of the horror genre by writing and creating new ones. Authors focus on the cultural work done by media audiences, how they engage with new technologies and how convergence culture impacts on the strategies and activities of popular media fans. This collection brings together leading academics in the fields of film, television, fan and cultural studies to open up and take further the debates surrounding popular media, its producers, its audiences, and the cultures in which they are ultimately located.

Lincoln Geraghty is Reader in Popular Media Cultures in the School of Media and Performing Arts at the University of Portsmouth. He is author of Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe (2007), American Science Fiction Film and Television (2009) and Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (2014).

Introduction: Fans and Paratexts; Lincoln Geraghty
PART I: WRITING IN THE MARGINS
1. We put the 'media' in (anti)social media': Channel 4's Youth Audiences, Unofficial Archives and the Promotion of Second-Screen Viewing; Michael O'Neill
2. Television Fandom in the Age of Narrowcasting: The Politics and Proximity in Regional Scripted Reality Dramas The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea; Cornel Sandvoss, Kelly Youngs and Joanne Hobbs
3. 'A Reason to Live': Utopia and Social Change in Star Trek Fan Letters; Lincoln Geraghty

PART II: READING BETWEEN THE LINES
4. Victims and Villains: Psychological Themes, Male Stars and Horror Films in the 1940s; Mark Jancovich
5. 'I Want to Do Bad Things With You': The TV Horror Title Sequence; Stacey Abbott
6. Cannibal Holocaust: The Paratextual (Re)Construction of History; Simon Hobbs
PART III: FROM SPOILER TO FAN ACTIVIST
7. From Angel to Much Ado: Cross-Textual Catharsis, Kinesthetic Empathy, and Whedonverse Fandom; Tanya R. Cochran
8. Location, location, location: Citizen-fan Journalists' 'set reporting' and Info-war in the Digital Age; Matt Hills
9. Sherlock Holmes, the Defacto Franchise; Roberta Pearson
10. 'Cultural acupuncture': Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance; Henry Jenkins

Afterword: Studying Media With and Without Paratexts; Jonathan Gray
Index