The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text

Abstract

The Harry Potter fan fiction text — a phenomenon in itself — has assumed its current, extraordinary, sprawling and expanding proportions almost entirely in the environment of the Internet, by exploiting the possibilities of global social networking. According to Tara Collins, by January 2006, popular fantasy fiction texts had attracted fan fiction writers in the largest quantities, especially the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter series; but whereas fan stories posted online for the former were estimated at 36,000, for the latter they exceeded 180,000.¹ The technology of the Internet is intricately enmeshed with the development of the phenomenon. Between the possibilities offered by the technology and the ability to exploit (and sometimes serendipity in working with) those possibilities the cultural form of fan fiction has dispersed and linked up, visibly and traceably, in ways that were impossible in the fanzine era. The entire Harry Potter phenomenon has unravelled as the electronic environment for social networking has been consolidated: within the frame of the development of blogging and web chatrooms from the mid-1990s, and the increasing popularity of social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook post-2000s. If the success of Harry Potter fandom demonstrates the success of niche media rather than large, centralised media corporations, then it also points to the facility with which niche media can now link up and generate new niches through networking, as Henry Jenkins observed in 2007.²