Fans of Literature and the Borders of a Text

Abstract

The contemporary phenomenon of fan fiction has triggered not only (renewed) discussions on the dividing lines between commercial and non-commercial activities, between subculture and the mainstream, professional and amateur literary productions and the non/importance of copyright in art in general, but has also presented new challenges to our understanding of the stability of a literary text and its boundaries. The paper aims at introducing the phenomenon of fanfiction, analyze some of its aspects, and focus on how the mere existence of fanfiction subverts the notion of a text as a stable artefact raising interesting questions about the character of human creativity.