Fans and Their Utterances in the Communications Circuit of Chinese Internet Literature

Increasingly, specific communication processes specific to professional fields are taken over by fans to promote, produce, and comment on online content. In this study, I engage speech acts and Bakhtinian heteroglossia to analyse fans’ voices and social roles in and beyond online communities, along with their impact on the lifecycle of Chinese internet literature (CIL). Selected online posts about the internet novel Mo Dao Zu Shi and its adaptations in four fan sub-communities show how fans utilize online utterances to participate in the lifecycle of CIL, employ speech acts to construct/assume/adopt different social identities, and achieve various intentions within the heteroglossic context of online fan communities. Therefore, my study contributes to the body of research on non-English-speaking fan communities.