Slovenska Literatura (Jul 2019)
The Czecho-Slovak Community in the Field of Contemporary Fan Fiction. The Case of the Harry Potter Fandom
Abstract
The goal of the paper is to map the Czecho-Slovak community in the field of contemporary fan fiction inspired by the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling as a follow-up to the tradition of research into the Czecho-Slovak literary and culural relations. It is built on the conception of a „peculiar literary community“ of the Czechs and the Slovaks formulated by Dionýz Ďurišin. What is then analyzed is the space of Czecho-Slovak websites administered by so-called fans for fans. The activities of the Czecho-Slovak community in the field of fan fiction cannot be summarized easily due to several reasons including the fact that the relations within the community are continuously developing and changing. The existence of the Czecho-Slovak literary community mainly influenced by nostalgia and personal mindsets of individual debaters is seemingly dominated by disruptive moments strongly motivated by rivarly between the two nations. That is mostly reflected in the debates about the Czech or Slovak translations of the original text. However, it is necessary to note that the community (so-called fandom) sees itself as Czecho-Slovak and the most-visited websites are declared to be Czecho-Slovak, too. Regardless of the most noticeable manifestations of non-togetherness, the fact that the common Czecho-Slovak space exists, what´s more spontaneously, without any ideological prompting, and provides place for linguistic debates, actually gives witness to strong cultural togetherness. The paper does not only attempt to follow in the research tradition but also to shift the focus that has so far been given to high literature to popular literature and culture, which is the area where the Czecho-Slovak community currently seems to be most active.
