The Production, Dissemination And Consumption Of Internet Fantasy Novels

In 1990 s witnessed the birth and rapid development of online fantasy novels. This new literary genre, which is the inevitable requirement of the times, originates from the revolution of traditional Kung fu novels. However, most of the current study of this more and more influential literary genre is mainly concentrated on the early works, such as Zhu Xian by Xiao Ding, Little Soldiers by Xuan Yu and In Search of the Supernatural by Shuxiayehu. Consequently, the study of fantasy novels has always been stagnant and out of date. From the perspective of production to consumption, this paper takes Qiandian.com, the representative website of fantastic literature, as an example to show the features of current online fantasy novels presented in each phase of production, spread and consumption. This paper is divided into 3 chapters as follows:The first chapter focuses on the status quo of fantastic literature, writers’ living condition, and the writing environment. Most of the current fantasy novels are of bad quality, which is shown as super-long text, too many misspellings, lengthy plots and a lack of logic. The living condition of the writers can be concluded as follows: varied writing motivations, desperate writing condition and huge income gap. The writing condition is divided in social environment and personal environment. Social environment provides writers favorable writing conditions, yet it also has limits. Personal environment tends to develop into professional writing environment.The second chapter studies the spreading methods and form of online fantasy novels. Online fantasy novels are usually released in the form of serialization. They are of super-long text, updated on a daily basis. The serialization lasts a long time while the writers come to public view from backstage. Online fantasy novels are mainly spread through some websites that are masculine and full of games. These websites provide various games and the game-like language is used there. The masculine feature is embodied in three aspects: firstly, most of the writers are males; additionally, male chauvinism appeared in the novels; furthermore, most of the readers are males. Another spreading way is through post bar, where readers’ reading freedom and interests are presentedThe third chapter comes to the online fantasy novels’ consumption phase. The precondition of making fantasy novels commodities is to commoditize the novel content. The commoditization is embodied in the following 3 aspects: patterned characters, plots produced like assembly line production, and impact language with a strong sense of pictures. After this commoditization process, these fantasy novels will access to market. The major consumers of the fantasy novels are readers aged 18 to 24, and 25 to 35. They have different consumption motivations and consumption level. They purchase either E-books or paper books. Both of the two consumption ways are indispensable and they form today’s consumption scale of online fantasy novels.