Abstract
From Henry Jenkins onwards, fan fiction study has walked pass almost 30 years and has covered a relatively large field including feminism, queer theory and mass culture, but many scholars still seem to miss the point that fan fiction is firstly a literary text and thus leave its literariness unexamined. In fact, with a high intertextuality and a “poacher” nature, fan fiction can serve as an ideal text to narratology study. This paper, through conducting a case study of The Lord of the Rings’ alternative universe fan fiction For Every Evil, is attempting to unfold fan authors’ literary talent in constructing functional character in the text and use it as a way to deliver personal interpretation to the canon. By applying characters’ known behavior as a method to resolve instability in fan fiction narrative and complete its narrative progress, authors who write alternative universe fan fiction show that this kind of “amateur” writing is worth a closer literary review. It is hoped that through the analysis, the literary merit of fan community can be better recognized, and fan fiction can be treated more as a genre rather than a cultural phenomenon in the future.
Highlights
Fan fiction study, nowadays, is no longer a strange term in academic field thanks to the flourishing of fan-created text on the Internet
The canon (Tolkien’s original trilogy and Peter Jackson’s Oscar winning film altogether) was once the spotlight of English fan fiction writing after the films came out, and For Every Evil has received a high reputation since its publication on fanfiction.com and become one of the representative AU The Lord of the Rings fan fictions for its outstanding portrayal of the life of the medieval characters in the 21st century
Some critics argue that fans tend to “choosing something to emphasize and others to play down, filtering the characters and the concepts through their own perceptions” (Jenkins, p. 181), fan fiction writers still try their best to claim fidelity to the source text, especially in characterization
Summary
Nowadays, is no longer a strange term in academic field thanks to the flourishing of fan-created text on the Internet. Since the mid-80s, many researches have been conducted on various fan texts, but because of its “unrestricted” nature 185), there are still many texts that have seldom been covered in the past 30 years, and the genre of “alternative universe” (AU for short) writing is one of them. By removing characters from their original setting and giving them new identities, alternative universe fan fiction provides its authors a broader stage to show their creativity in narrative experimentation than other homodiegetic fan works. A closer look at the narrative device of AU fan fiction is worth conducting in order to better understand the literary merit of fan community
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