Fanfic book I picked up cheap

Welcome to 2020! This will be first year for more than a decade with no new Friendship is Magic episodes. Talking of which, I plan on resuming the "My Little Repeats" S1 episode rewatches in the next day or two; the next ep is of course "Sonic Rainboom". For now, though, here's a slightly off-centre post, though as there's a reasonable amount of My Little Pony later in my post I haven't used the "non-pony" tag.

A little present I picked up for myself just before Christmas was the book you see above, Sheenagh Pugh's The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a literary context, which I noticed on sale for a quid in a WH Smith clearance section. At that price, it didn't seem much of a risk. I didn't know anything about Pugh, but she seems to have written quite a bit, mainly poetry. I've only just had the time to start reading the book, so this isn't a proper review, but I'm a few chapters in and enjoying the read rather a lot.

As its subtitle suggests, this is a book that doesn't look at fanfic from the perspective of sociology or women's studies or whatever, though those aspects do inevitably creep in around the edges. Instead, it looks as the actual writing in terms of narrative voices, character choices, genre selection and so on. It's aimed at a general audience, so there's little of the brain-melting erudition you might get from some of Bad Horse's really in-depth studies on Fimfiction, but it's not merely superficial.

The reason it was being remaindered was that it was published in 2005, an age ago where the internet is concerned. The book is full of references and footnotes, but the majority are now dead links, with only fanfiction.net really still prominent from the fanfic hosts of long ago. (Archive of Our Own didn't even exist when The Democratic Genre hit the shelves.) There's not a single mention in the index of Harry Potter, either, though that series was well established by then so I'd imagine that was a deliberate omission.

The book's choice of fandoms is interesting: Pugh consciously chose not to write yet another look into Star Trek fic, but instead to concentrate on British fandoms, some better known than others outside the UK. The fandoms she chooses are Jane Austen, The Bill, Blakes 7, Discworld and Hornblower – a reasonable mixture of book-based, TV-based and both-based worlds. Since Discworld is the only one of those I know well, I'm not sure how vigorous or otherwise the other fandoms may still be.

Of course, since this is Louder Yay I'll have to make the obvious point that My Little Pony doesn't get a mention either, though there was doubtless some ponyfic around back then. True, it's a non-British fandom and so wouldn't have been a primary focus even were Pugh's book more recent, but I suspect it might have got at least passing attention. Perhaps for the strikingly good design of Fimfiction, more likely for its being a fandom with a cast of strong female characters – Buffy does get noted by Pugh for just this reason.

I wonder if anyone has ever attempted any sort of history/assessment of the MLP (G4) fanfic world as a whole? Pugh isn't herself a fanfic author in any of the fandoms she covers, so inevitably a piece on ponyfic written by a fan would have a somewhat different texture. It would also ideally need that rare beast, a writer who has been both an active and an enthusiastic part of the ponyfic world from its early days to the present time. If anyone does know of anything like this, please do say so!