[hugh3]

I'm not really convinced that Jane Austen inspires the same level of fandom that Star Wars does.

There is, of course, one genre that inspires the same sort of crazed-geek fandom as science fiction, and that's "fantasy". Both genres, of course, are based in worlds very different from our own, though not too different (there are always humans or human-analogues, at least in popular examples of the genre). What's more, what these worlds have in common is that they allow people whom the reader considers analogous to themselves to become ridiculously powerful and important in a way that they just don't in the real world. An entire universe is provided for readers to escape into, and this becomes particularly addictive for those who aren't finding much success in the real world.

Now I guess Jane Austen is interesting in that it wasn't originally set in a world all that different from Jane Austen's own, but with the passage of time the world of Regency England has become almost as foreign as Middle Earth. I can see how someone tired of a world where wooing is conducted by misspelled text message might prefer to escape into a world where every girl seems to wind up with a handsome millionaire without trying too hard.

Maybe in two hundred years, American Pie will be escapist fantasy as well. "Man, I wish I lived back in the days where you could have sex (or eat a pie) without having to get a license from the government..."

[RK]

Jane Austen's uber-fans are called Janeites, complete with conventions and "re-enactments".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janeite

From the Wikipedia entry:

Lynch has described committed Janeites as members of a cult...

[julius_geezer]

Rudyard Kipling wrote an entertaining story, "The Janeites." The characters in the story, for what it's worth, are not girls but rather officers and men of British battery at the front in 1917 or so.

[lzimm]

my point was that it doesn't inspire fandom. i was comparing influence.