I’ve talked before about whether writing fanfiction is good or bad. But is fanfiction literature?

It’s hard to imagine a Vampire Diaries smut story sitting on the same shelf as Beowulf or the Discworld books. Admittedly, a majority of fanfiction falls far short of readers’ (not to mention editors’) expectations of literature as we classically define it. 

And yet… you know I’m not going to stop here and say no, fanfiction can never be considered literature. How boring would that be?

So, Can Fanfics Be Considered Literature?

As I mentioned in my post discussing whether visual novels qualify as literature, the definition of “literature” is somewhat up for debate. By its simplest definition, literature is any poetry or prose that gets written down. But of course, when people ask, “Is fanfiction literature?” what they are really asking is, “Are fanfics good enough to be considered literature?”

My answer is, it depends on the fanfic.

According to Merriam-Webster’s definition, the term “fanfiction” encompasses nothing more (and nothing less) than “stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet.”

So, yes, a Supernatural x Harry Potter crossover story would definitely qualify as fanfiction so long as it was not written by the original creators. Would it qualify as literature? That would depend, in my opinion, on how well it was written.

Most readers, after all, wouldn’t think twice about claiming T.H. White’s The Once and Future King as a literary classic.

What many of those readers—especially the professional critics among them—might be more hesitant to admit is that it also absolutely counts as a fanfic. Its basis? Le Morte d’Arthur, written several hundred years prior by Sir Thomas Malory, and all the Arthurian legends that preceded it.

When is Fanfiction Literature?

The Once and Future King is just one of many examples of classic literary fanfiction. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas’s own admission, was inspired by a book called Mémoires de Monsieur d’Artagnan. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a Bible fanfic. And let’s not forget Gregory Maguire’s Wicked books, which is of course a reimagining of Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz series.

And the list goes on.

So what is the difference between these world-renowned literary classics and a cheap ripoff? At what point does fanfiction become literature?

Popularity certainly doesn’t tip the scales one way or the other—at least not in my books. The Fifty Shades of Grey novels, for example, began as Twilight fanfiction, and have since sold over 125 million copies. But is it literature? Some would say yes. Many, I think, would argue otherwise.

What makes a work literary or not is not whether it is popular, or even whether it is professionally published. Let’s be honest, even the best publishing houses release subpar titles now and again. And many great works of literature go unread until well after the original author’s passing.

(Who knows what treasures of poetry and prose lie buried, even now, beneath paperwork and drawer junk, waiting to be discovered?)

Instead, I think it all comes down to the quality of the writing and of the story itself. Fanfiction is literature when it tells a story with substance—and tells it well. It also needs to add something original to the telling, whether it be a new angle, a new message, or entirely new plot points. 

Whether a fanfic does any of those things, of course, is entirely up to the reader to judge. It’s as simple, and complicated, as that.

A Few More Literary Fanfics Worth Reading

I’ll be honest, I haven’t read (or written) fanfiction labeled as such for several years now. I didn’t make any conscious choice to give it up, per se—it’s more that physical books are much easier on my eyes, and far less likely to trigger a migraine. (This is also why I don’t get to read a lot of e-books.)

But whether you’re a fanfic writer looking for a little motivation, or a reader happy to support the community (and perhaps read a little outside your comfort zone), any of the following stories will make excellent additions to your (and in some cases, my) TBR pile:

• Othello by William Shakespeare (based on “The Moorish Captain”
• The Aeneid by Virgil (based on The Odyssey and The Iliad)
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (inspired by the Bible and The Aeneid—fanfic inception!)
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (another Arthurian tale, this time with an American twist)
• “A Study in Emerald” by Neil Gaiman (a Lovecraftian story starring Sherlock Holmes)
• Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (another retelling of The Odyssey)
• The Merry Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley (inspired by The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and all the legends that came before)
• The Shoebox Project by Dorkorific and LadyJaida (based on the Harry Potter series)
• Luminosity by Alicorn (a Twilight retelling)
• “Reminiscence” by Kenya Starflight (based on Calvin and Hobbes)

I wrote my own fanfiction back in the day, of course, but I’m not sure any of it belongs among titles of such high praise. Some are straight-up cringe-worthy now. Others, there’s a secret part of me that’s still just a tiny bit proud—both of their execution and how well they were received—but no, I’m not going to link to them here. Good luck hunting them down. 😉

Kim Berkley is a fantasy author and narrative designer who, like many writers before her, began by adapting others’ stories before moving on to writing her own. She has since published an original interactive novel, The Harbinger’s Head, and is currently working on The Dragon’s Last Flight, among other things…