On Times Online, a review by Michael Saler entitled The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture, book review of David Hajdu, The ten-cent plague: The great comic-book scare and how it changed America; and Michael Chabon, Maps and legends: Reading and writing along the borderlands.
Saler organizes his review around conceptions of high versus low culture. Of Chabon’s book, Saler notes:
Munificent artists can’t be contained within the arbitrary distinctions between literature and genre, the “serious” and the “entertaining”. Chabon doesn’t need to reach for his gun to dispatch such distinctions. He simply redefines them: “All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction”.
Hear hear!
