Textual Poachers was generally well received by Jenkins's scholarly peers, though there were also questions about his decision to study fans, fanfiction, and fan culture seriously. In a 1993 review for
Film Quarterly, Gregg Rickman states that
Textual Poachers was "Sure to be a landmark in televisual studies" and that it was "the first work I know of to take the fans of such shows as
Star Trek and
Beauty and the Beast seriously." In a 1997 review for H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online), Anne Collins Smith writes that "This book is theoretically complex, thoroughly researched, and tightly argued. Moreover, Jenkins models admirable behavior for the popular-culture researcher, carefully balancing respect for fans' privacy and a desire to let their voices be heard. This book would be an invaluable resource for anyone working in media studies or audience theory." Elsewhere in her review, though, Smith expresses confusion about why Jenkins focuses on certain aspects of fan culture or why he maintains such a distance between himself and the fans he writes about. Bronwen Thomas writes in 2011 that
Textual Poachers "contributed more than any previous study to the establishment of a distinctive sphere of "fan" studies, and it remains a seminal text."
Francesca Coppa describes the book in 2017 as a "real field-founder that lays out many of the theories and terms still in use today", and states that it was better received among fans than
Camille Bacon-Smith's
Enterprising Women and Constance Penley's article "Feminism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture", which both appeared in the same year. == References ==