Sometimes I think it is -- a critique in fictional form, showing what the reader thinks was missing or wrong, not unlike a traditional parody, except by adding or fixing what the writer thinks is missing instead of exaggerating what is there. Like the Wind Done Gone, which was ruled a parody, but is hardly Bored of the Rings.
Or Wide Sargasso Sea, a "prequel" to Jane Eyre written a century later (I disliked Wide Sargasso Sea, but that's me. Or Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Or, y'know, the majority of Shakespeare's plays, though he usually filed the serial numbers off so maybe they don't count. :D
There's actually a subgenre of Literature with a capital L that is, essentially, fanfic of old works in the literary canon. Perhaps authors get away with this more easily than fanfic of contemporary works because they are considered a kind of "updating"; the author is taking a feminist or non-colonial or otherwise "modern" view of the text, and running with it. Sometimes in the opposite direction.
Like so many things, there's an awful lot of "grey area" in the realm of building off of someone else's ideas.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-10-21 11:50 am (UTC)Or Wide Sargasso Sea, a "prequel" to Jane Eyre written a century later (I disliked Wide Sargasso Sea, but that's me. Or Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Or, y'know, the majority of Shakespeare's plays, though he usually filed the serial numbers off so maybe they don't count. :D
There's actually a subgenre of Literature with a capital L that is, essentially, fanfic of old works in the literary canon. Perhaps authors get away with this more easily than fanfic of contemporary works because they are considered a kind of "updating"; the author is taking a feminist or non-colonial or otherwise "modern" view of the text, and running with it. Sometimes in the opposite direction.
Like so many things, there's an awful lot of "grey area" in the realm of building off of someone else's ideas.