“Tell it to Harry Potter, would you suddenly meet him”: Sf&F Fan Fiction as a Post-Folklore Genre of the WWW Age

Abstract

The article examines the current situation in the modern Russian net-literature, where, along with the predominance of romantic fantasy and theso-called Lit-RPG (stories based on computer role-playing games), there is a rise of fan fiction, i. e. amateur fiction based on milestones (literary and cinematic — books, films, TV series, anime, computer games, etc.) of popular culture. As a special subgenre of amateur creativity, fan fiction has emerged in the English-speaking culture in the 1930s, then the emergence of the Internet has contributed to its spread and further development, and in the 1999-2000s a Russian-speaking segment of fan fiction has been formed, significant in volume and diverse in topics. This work examines the genesis of this kind of neterature and reveals the post-folklore nature of modern fan fiction, defines fan fiction as a specific phenomenon of modern popular culture, characterizes the peculiarities of fan fiction as a subject of scientific research, and provides some quantitative characteristics of the corpus of Russian-language fan fiction. The article presents outlines and prospects for further study.

Keywords: Post-folklore, children’s literature, fantasy, SFF, popular culture, fan fiction, net-literature, communication