What Faust, Hamlet, and Xena the Warrior Princess have in common.
By CATHY YOUNG | REASON
By now many people outside the peculiar world of fandom know there exists something called fan fiction—that there are reams of reader-generated stories floating around the Internet based on characters from TV, movies, and books. Fanfic has been around for a long time, but it has attracted an unusual amount of media attention in the last three or four years. Several major papers, including The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, have devoted articles to the phenomenon—though no one seems sure whether to treat it as a literary genre or a quaintly amusing hobby.
