Alexandra Edwards, '12 MA, Awarded Honorable Mention from the MLA

 Alexandra Edwards, a 2012 graduate of Villanova's MA English program and an instructor at Texas Christian University, was recently awarded an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for their Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars. Alex received the mention for her book, Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom.

According to Edwards's book's website, her book "investigates the overlapping cultures of fandom and American literature from the late 1800s to the mid-1940s, exploding the oft-repeated myth that fandom has its origins in the male-dominated letter columns of science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s."

In the words of the MLA prize committee:

“Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom makes an ambitious intervention and speaks across genres and disciplines. Alexandra Edwards’s study will become required reading in the growing genre of fanfiction studies. Edwards conclusively disproves the usual story of its male sci-fi origins by uncovering a rich history of women’s magazine fandoms in the early twentieth century, demonstrating that popular readers were active participants, recovering the rich history of women’s clubs, fan mail, and magazines. In its superb archival research, its skillful cross-disciplinary analysis, and its deserved attention to issues of racial reclamation and queer eroticism, Before Fanfiction offers a model of how to perform a joyful recuperation of popular work, asking readers, ‘What other stories can we say yes to?’”

You can learn more about Alexandra from previous coverage here on the YAWP, or from her website.

Congratulations, Alexandra!