Prequels, Sequels and beyond

Prequels, Sequels and beyond
in this recent scholar book with Brontë-related content:

Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
Edited by Armelle Parey
First Published 1 March 2018
eBook Published 30 August 2018
Imprint Routledge
eBook ISBN 9780429795893

This book offers to delineate a key phenomenon in contemporary Anglophone fiction: novel expansion, when the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before, after or during the narrative time of the source-text. If autographic and allographic sequels are almost as old as literature, prequels – that imagine the anteriority of a narrative – and coquels – that develop secondary characters in the same story time as the source-text – are more recent. The overall trend for novel expansion spread in the mid-1980s and 1990s and has since shown no sign of abating.
This volume is organised following three types of relationships to the source-texts even if these occasionally combine to produce a more complex structure. This book comprises 11 essays, preceded by an introduction, that examine narrative strategies, aesthetic, ethical and political tendencies underlying these novel expansions. Following the overview provided in the introduction, the reader will find case studies of prequels, coquels and sequels before a final chapter that encompasses them all and more.

Includes the chapters:

Wide Sargasso Sea as a Prequel to Jane Eyre.From Visualising to Iconicising the Female Other
by Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès

As it rewrites the canonical hypotext that is Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea seeks to give its main female protagonist, Antoinette aka Bertha, a life, a voice, an image and a capacity to gaze at the male protagonist in a way that makes him uncomfortable. This chapter argues that, as Antoinette is made to enter the visual economy of the novel, she is turned into an icon, i.e. a visual representation that is widely acknowledged, of female resistance to male oppression. Thus, her character is used by Rhys in order to revisit the Victorian canon and give it a more saliant critical edge. In her prequel to Jane Eyre, Bertha, the “madwoman in the attic” (Gilbert and Gubar), becomes an emblem of courageous opposition to arbitrary and perverse forms of control of the female self.

Uncanny Repetitions
The Generative Power of the “Reader, I Married Him” Mantra in Tracy Chevalier’s Anthology of Short Stories
by Georges Letissier

Like “To be or not to be, that is the question”, “Reader, I Married Him” is probably one of the most iconic phrases in English literature. In 2016, to celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, it was chosen as a trigger to invite twenty-one contemporary women writers to submit a short story. What might look like an Oulipian constraint, reminiscent of the techniques pioneered by writers such as Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec or Italo Calvino, enlarges the spectrum of “second degree literature” as defined by Gérard Genette. Indeed, this “writing after” (the world-famous Brontëan snippet) is by no means reducible to sequel writing, or any transfictional, chronological sequencing, such as prequel or coquel. Some of the titles of the edited stories incite us to consider “writing after” in terms of literary montage, collage or serendipitous (shock) encounters between imaginary universes.