Anglo-American Fan Studies and Their Impact on the Development of Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The aim of the article is to reveal the main stages of the research of fans in fan studies discourse and analyse the evolution of fan culture development that took place in the 21st century. Results. The article demonstrates that a separate scientific direction is dedicated to the study of fan communities in the Anglo-American academic environment — fan studies, which went through three distinct periods in their development: deviation, resistance (20th century), and mainstream (21st century). In the cultural aspect, the concepts of “fanatic/fanaticism” and “fan/ fandom” are distinguished. It is shown that Anglo-American fan studies define fan culture as an expressive lifestyle of fans of a certain cultural phenomenon or of a bearer of a certain cultural tradition, and in the last two decades, the fan studies direction, where fan culture is connected with fandom, has been intensively developing. It is stated that fandom is a self-organised community built around shared pleasure from a certain product of cultural industries in the digital media environment, and a fan is considered as a person who invests his time, energy, and money in interaction with a media product that is the object of his interests. The scientific novelty consists in determining the methodological status of the concept of “fan culture”, revealing the role of fan communities in the creation of popular culture in the 21st century. Conclusions. Fans began to play an active role in the processes of cultural creation, thanks to their creative work, there was a transition from passive consumption of mass culture products to active production of works of popular culture. Fan culture as a special community and environment of joint creative work among fans of literary works, television series, comics, and computer games, blurs the difference between consumption and production, becoming a vivid phenomenon of popular culture.