Fanfiction for Literary Scholars???

[fictional]

Why have I never heard about this before?

...McGann suggested that Walter Scott's famous romance fiction Ivanhoe contained within itself many alternative narrative possibilities, and he added that this kind of thing was characteristic of imaginative works in general. Scott's book epitomizes this situation in the many continuations it spawned throughout the nineteenth-century - versions in different genres as well as other kinds of responses, textual, pictorial, musical. For example, when many Victorian readers complained about Scott's decision to marry Ivanhoe to Rowena and not Rebecca, they were clearly responding to one of the book's underdeveloped possibilities. In our own day readers often react to other unresolved tensions in the book - for example, to the complex ways it handles, and mishandles, the subject of anti-Semitism. "Everyone knows that an anti-Semitic strain runs through the novel," he said. "The question is: 'What are you prepared to DO about it? Victorians rewrote and reimagined the book. Why are we so hesitant about doing the same thing?'"

The concept of criticism as "a doing", as action and intervention, is a founding principle of IVANHOE.
...

Fanfiction as criticism! Two great tastes...