Chapter 27 Further Reading

Foundational Work on Parasocial Relationships and Loss

Horton, Donald and Richard Wohl. "Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance." Psychiatry 19, no. 3 (1956): 215–229. The founding text of parasocial relationship research. Horton and Wohl's original analysis includes discussion of what happens to the audience when a parasocial partner is removed — by death, retirement, or the end of a program — making it directly relevant to the chapter's concerns.

Cohen, Jonathan. "Parasocial Breakups: Measuring Individual Differences in Responses to the Dissolution of Parasocial Relationships." Mass Communication and Society 6, no. 2 (2003): 191–202. Cohen's research specifically on "parasocial breakup" — the dissolution of the parasocial relationship — is among the most directly relevant empirical work to Chapter 27's framework. He develops measures for the intensity of parasocial breakup responses and demonstrates their relationship to parasocial relationship depth.

Stever, Gayle S. "Fantasy and Reality in the Responses of Modern Celebrity Fans." Imagination, Cognition and Personality 31, no. 4 (2012): 263–280. Stever's research on celebrity fan psychology provides context for understanding the depth of parasocial investment that underlies the intensity of parasocial loss responses. She challenges the pathology model of celebrity fandom and provides a normal-psychological account of parasocial investment.

On Grief and Bereavement

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. Macmillan, 1969. The foundational text for the five-stage model. Reading Kübler-Ross's own presentation of the model — with its specific clinical context and its careful hedging — is valuable for understanding how the model has been both applied and misapplied in popular culture.

Klass, Dennis, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman, eds. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis, 1996. The foundational collection for continuing bonds theory. Particularly relevant to understanding the fan community's archival and creative activities during parasocial loss periods as healthy continuing bonds work rather than pathological non-acceptance.

Doka, Kenneth J., ed. Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington Books, 1989. The foundational text on disenfranchised grief. The concept applies to parasocial grief in ways that Doka did not anticipate — he was primarily thinking about personal relationship losses — but the framework transfers directly and illuminates the social position of parasocial grief.

On Celebrity Death and Fan Community Response

Sandvoss, Cornel. A Game of Two Halves: Football, Television and Globalization. Routledge, 2003. Though focused on sports fandom, Sandvoss's analysis of parasocial identification and its loss responses provides useful comparative context for understanding how fan communities process the loss of a parasocial object across different fandom types.

Feasey, Rebecca. "The Contemporary Obsession with Celebrity Mortality." Mortality 27, no. 3 (2022): 285–298. Examines how contemporary celebrity culture's relationship to death and mortality shapes fan grief practices. Relevant to the case study on Chadwick Boseman and the intersection of real and fictional grief.

Click, Melissa A., Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz, eds. Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Vampire Franchise. Peter Lang, 2010. While focused on Twilight fandom, this collection includes analysis of parasocial loss responses (to the series' ending, to cast changes) that is methodologically relevant to the chapter's case study analysis.

On the BTS / K-Pop Fandom

Jung, Sun and Doobo Shim. "Social Distribution: K-Pop Fan Practices in Indonesia and the 'Gangnam Style' Phenomenon." International Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 5 (2014): 485–501. Provides context for the international organizational dimensions of K-pop fan communities that the chapter analyzes through the BTS military hiatus case. The article's attention to local/global tensions in fan practice is directly relevant to the cross-national grief comparison in section 27.4.

Oh, Chuyun. "The K-pop Idol's Body as Spectacle: A Case Study of BTS." International Journal of Korean Studies 23, no. 1 (2019): 1–28. Examines how BTS's bodies and public personas are constructed for fan consumption — essential context for understanding what the military hiatus meant as a loss of access to that constructed parasocial object.

On Fan Creative Production and Loss

De Kosnik, Abigail. "Fandom as Free Labor." In Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, edited by Trebor Scholz. Routledge, 2013. De Kosnik's analysis of fan labor includes attention to the creative labor that fans perform during and after loss events — relevant to the chapter's analysis of the creative surge as both grief processing and community gift.

Busse, Kristina and Karen Hellekson. "Introduction: Work in Progress." In Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Hellekson and Busse. University of Iowa Press, 2006. The introduction's discussion of fan fiction as a community practice is essential context for understanding how fix-it fic and memorial fan creativity function as collective grief work rather than individual creative expression.

On the Supernatural Fandom

Larsen, Katherine and Lynn Zubernis, eds. Fan Phenomena: Supernatural. Intellect Books, 2013. A collection of essays on the Supernatural fan community that provides context for the Archive and the Outlier case study running through the textbook. The collection predates the 2020 finale but documents the community practices and parasocial investment patterns that the finale would eventually rupture.

Zubernis, Lynn and Katherine Larsen. Fandom at the Crossroads: Celebration, Shame, and Fan/Producer Relationships. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Zubernis and Larsen's analysis of the Supernatural fan community's relationship with the show's producers is directly relevant to understanding the parasocial betrayal that many fans experienced in the series finale — the long history of creator-fan communication that preceded and complicated the ending.

Mental Health and Fan Community

Schroy, Cassandra, et al. "Different Motivations as Predictors of Psychological Connection to Fan Involvement, Fan Groups, and Fandoms." Psychology of Popular Media Culture 5, no. 4 (2016): 441–461. Examines the psychological functions of fan community membership, including the emotional support functions that are most relevant to the chapter's analysis of fan communities as grief communities.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Radway's foundational study of popular culture consumption includes attention to how community dimensions of cultural engagement provide emotional support and collective meaning-making — directly relevant to the fan community as grief community analysis.

Further Exploration

Organization for Transformative Works Journal (Transformative Works and Cultures) The OTW's peer-reviewed journal regularly publishes fan studies research on parasocial loss events, grief communities, and creative surge responses. Issues from 2020 onward include multiple articles responding to the Supernatural finale and the COVID-era pattern of celebrity deaths that tested fan community grief infrastructure.

The Fanhackers Blog (fanhackers.transformativeworks.org) The OTW's curated bibliography and research summary blog regularly features summaries of recent research on fan community responses to loss events, including celebrity deaths and series endings. A useful ongoing resource for students seeking to keep up with current research.