On April 17, Bettina Soller will give the lecture “Harry Potter and Twilight Crossover Fan Fiction: Mastering the Universes” on the PCA/ACA National Conference 2014 in Chicago.

“In the last decade, crossover fan fiction has grown to become one of the dominant modes of fan writing. Fan fiction archives hosts hundreds, if not thousands of texts in which Edward Cullen and his family attend or work at Hogwarts; and as many texts in which Harry, Ron or Hermoine attend the high school in Forks, where they run into the vampires of the Cullen clan.

This article will investigate the strategies fan authors employ to accommodate characters from different imaginary worlds in one narrative and the discourse among fans about crossover writing and the creation of worlds.

The corpus will consist of Twilight/Harry Potter crossover fan fiction hosted on Fanfiction.net. I will examine crossover fan fiction texts via close readings to investigate the writing strategies of crossover fan authors. Further, the discourse about crossover writing as well as the evaluation and discussion of specific fan texts by its readers will be investigated through an analysis of the comments and reviews of these texts. I will employ literary and media theories about imaginary worlds by Mark J.P. Wolf and Michael Saler and apply them to fan writing.

The article sets out to investigate if fan authors actually do fuse the imaginary worlds of different media franchises in one logical entity, or if these texts allow for contradictions and how their audience discusses these texts.” (PCA/ACA 2014 event management site)