Writing Fannishly: Authorship and Minor Writing in L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon Trilogy and Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl

This article reanimates critical conversations concerning representations of female youth authorship in classic and contemporary adolescent fiction. It advocates for a reassessment of the significance of “low-brow”, “less original” types of authorship represented by fanfiction—or, what I term, “fannish writing.” Often dismissed by academics as a hindrance to the professional achievements of female writer protagonists, these modes of authorship actually provide a conduit for aspiring writers to challenge and disrupt established literary cultures and authorial conventions. This article explains how this process works in juvenile fiction by drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of minor literature, especially how this concept maps onto the characteristics of fannish writing. Through detailed analyses of L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon trilogy and Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, this study illustrates how drawing parallels between young female characters’ fannish writing endeavours and Deleuzian minor politics offers a fresh perspective on authorial practices in female Künstler narratives, enabling critics to conceptualise acts of writing beyond the expectations of dominant authorship values. In this way, this work complicates previous research that disparages the legitimacy of fanfiction in narratives of female Künstler figures, revealing the distinct and vital worth of such writing as a ‘minoritarian’ discourse that shapes our perception of the subversive capacity of young girls’ writing strategies in adolescent fiction.