Watching a snippet of John Mullan’ s How Reading Made us Modern last night, my ears pricked up when the good professor intones the fact that in pre-eighteenth century England, the only books you’d find most places would be the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, “and perhaps some choice work of Christian devotion”.

Would it be possible, I thought, to write a view of Pilgrim’s Progress as fan fiction? Bunyan’s certainly a fan of the good book, and as for world-making, there’s a whole Christian cosmology in there that seems to still be pretty popular. As for governance of the formal boundaries and schisms of the field as such, no-one does sectarian suspicion quite like the church, and the very word canon meant church law before it meant anything else. (I think). And as for the Author of some of the texts in question…

To really get at this field (‘Christian textuality and its fans’?) is a gargantuan task of Foucauldian proportions; mapping its powers and proclivities. One would have to perform a bit of sleight-of-hand to avoid exposing any such essay to the vast gulf that it opens up. But it does open it up.

Still haven’t read any of Jenkins’ views on the subject of authorial identity fandom, but I think I’ll be carrying some baggage in there with me.