Tillsammans i Engelsfors : Socialt fiktionsbruk i Engelsforstrilogins digitala fangemenskap 2011–2016

Sammanfattning: The thesis examines a digital reading community within a framework of fan culture. This community was formed in the early 2010s by fans of a Swedish fantasy series, The Engelsfors Trilogy (2011–2013), written by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren. Fan culture can be described as an interpretative community with established terminology and repertoires. Within a growing participatory culture, fans’ active engagements with fictional worlds have become mainstream, and more broadly spread. My study focuses on the creative practice of fan art, that is stories, pictures and videos created by fans, with an original work as a point of departure. I examine fan art as a form of reader response, expressed and shared within the digital community. The empirical material consists of blog posts (about 800) published between 2011 and 2016 on six different websites. Focusing on the readers of fan culture, my study combines perspectives of sociology of literature and fan studies. I also use theoretical concepts from narratology to discuss relations between the multiple variations of the Engelsfors universe that emerge through fan art. The analysis is partly a quantitative survey covering the art work’s forms and content, as well as contextual aspects of posting and sharing Engelsfors-related material, partly close readings of the most significant motifs: the engagement with fictional characters and romantic readings of the main love story. The approach provides a holistic perspective, unusual in research about fans and reading communities. By comparing the activities in different digital contexts, I argue for more nuanced perspectives on how digital engagements differ in relation to user purposes. The readers’ art works as well as their interaction, centre on the fictive characters, their features, personalities and relationships. Emotional readings comprise a general focus within fan culture, and among Engelsfors fans the emphasis is on strong positive emotions like affection, friendship, security, romance and love. Paying close attention to emotive aspects of how and why reading experiences are being shared has been a key perspective when looking at how different creative and communicative practices relate to different needs and purposes among the fan readers. Critical modifications of the source text are rare, and instead an enthusiastic and affirmative attitude dominates in relation to the authors’ project as well as to fellow fans in the community.