Crossover: “The Snow Queen” in the World of Contemporary Readership

Abstract

The article is devoted to Russian readers’ remakes in the subgenre of crossover of H-C. Andersen’s fairy-tale “The Snow Queen,” using it as a baseline for their own creativity. In crossovers, represented on a popular website for Russian fan fiction, ficbook.net, the plot and characters of the canonical tale are juxtaposed and unified with plots and characters of other literary and cinematic works, cartoons and popular television programs. Readers rethink beloved fairy-tales, placing them in the context of their own individual intertextual fields which are formed by the combination of a literary canon and contemporary popular films and TV shows. Crossovers result from analytic and creative reading of texts created by different cultures and in different artistic languages. In the more general sense, crossovers might be seen as interpretations that appear on a border between different texts, media, and discourses.

In the article, the phenomenon of crossovers is analyzed through semiotic culture theories by Mikhail Lotman, Ronald Barthes, and Michael Riffaterre. The author of the article reveals the connections among creation of crossovers with particular qualities of readers’ reception, creativity of authors-amateurs, and contemporary mass culture.

Keywords: H.-C.Andersen, The Snow Queen, fan fiction, crossover, creative juxtaposition, montage, semiotics of culture.