Abstract
In the age of what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture” [17] characterized by the development of new media, fan-based products, including fan fiction writing, cannot escape from scholars’ eyes. As one of the best-sellers in the past two decades, Harry Potter series has earned countless devoting fans around the world, and its fan fiction, with its quantity and quality, has expanded its influence outside the fan community. Many attentions have been put on the producers and the consumers, but the fan-authored texts themselves have been constantly unnoticed. This paper is to explore the power of readers in reconstructing characters’ relationship by a close textual analysis on Harry Potter and its fan fiction Eclipse from the aspect of narrative skill. By examining how internal and zero focalization are used in the Harry Potter canon and its fanon, it is clear that readers are able to justify the reconstructed relationship in the process of fan fiction writing. It turns out that fan fiction is not as “meaningless” as people might think; it can serves as a tool for fans to heal and educate themselves, and add more color and vitality to the world of literature by providing various interpretations to the source text.
Highlights
Readers’ roles as literary critics have been revalued with the rising popularity of reader-response criticism since 1960s
This paper is to explore the power of readers in reconstructing characters’ relationship by a close textual analysis on Harry Potter and its fan fiction Eclipse from the aspect of narrative skill
By examining how internal and zero focalization are used in the Harry Potter canon and its fanon, it is clear that readers are able to justify the reconstructed relationship in the process of fan fiction writing
Summary
Readers’ roles as literary critics have been revalued with the rising popularity of reader-response criticism since 1960s. With this trend, fans, a group of very devoted readers, have been taken into account in many academic studies mainly regarding the formation of its community, its cultural phenomenon and production.. This paper, by putting a fan fiction text (fanon) under a literary criticism lens, aims to reveal readers’ power to reconstruct characters’ relationships and to provide new interpretations to the source text (canon). By applying focalization in the textual analysis, it is clear that fans are capable of justifying the reconstructed relationships and shedding light on the development of the literary world. The success of the reconstructed fan fiction complicates the characters, and fans will take it as the new rule to re-examine the canon, allowing the diversity of the source text to be further discussed
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