ENGLISH FAN FICTION: RESEARCH PROSPECTS

Abstract

The article highlights perspective trends investigation of the English fanfiction. The work offers a brief outline of history, main forms and modern trends in fan fiction studies as a genre of web literature. The relevance of the study of fan fiction is due, above all, to the fact that these works are a bright example of the so called live language. They reflect all modern language trends, express the musical, literary and film preferences of young people. In addition, fan fiction is an understudied phenomenon that has existed in various forms, but has received the greatest impetus in development only in recent decades. The term fan fiction is defined as a kind of creativity of fans of popular works of art, a derivative literary work based on any original work that uses its ideas of the plot and characters. It is the genre of mass literature, created on the basis of a work of art by fans of this work, which do not pursue commercial purposes and are intended for reading by other fans. Early works on fan fiction often dealt with this phenomenon from a gender perspective, as the practice of fan fiction is mostly feminine. The most common source for fan fiction research was fandom material from popular television series at the time. The main focus of the study of fandoms was the practices and values of their participants, the characteristics of the fan as a person, as well as the distinctive features of the culture that the participants of the fandoms created. Fan fiction can be treated as a type of discourse within the scope of Internet linguistics and literary studies. Such main forms of fan fiction as alternative universe, crack, crossover, fix-it, POV, smut, RPF, angst, hurt / comfort, and others are being viewed in the article. Thus, despite huge diversity and versatility of fan fiction forms and genres, it is possible to classify them and analyze their peculiarities. Fan fiction can be regarded as a verbal (sometimes creolized) written message which is shared on the Internet and is aimed, first of all, at the admirers of the source book, film etc. The perspective of this study is the analysis of structural, stylistic and pragmatic features of fan fiction discourse.