fannishliss

If you ever feel like fanfic isn't getting the respect it deserves, here is a little list I came up with.
Please share your own ideas and examples in the comments!

CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES.  Chaucer used a number of pre-existing sources for his tales, including Bocaccio's Decameron.

many of SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS.   Shakespeare famously used existing stories for many of his plays -- like Macbeth or Hamlet, and of course, used historical figures (he wrote  REAL PERSON FIC!!!) to base his stories on.

MILTON'S PARADISE LOST. Anyone who thinks Milton came up with the character of Lucifer, or Adam and Eve, on his own, has clearly not read some pretty important literature that is at least a couple thousand years older than Milton.

Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN.  Mary Shelley was influenced by Paradise Lost in her conception of the Creature, which she acknowledges in the epigraph:
"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?"
—Paradise Lost, X, 743-45
Or, in one of my favorite quotes from the book, the Creature says: "I ought to have been thine Adam, but am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed."

Percy Shelley's PROMETHEUS UNBOUND -- a fixit story of an ancient myth.  :D

During the 19th century, it was popular to put on Shakespeare's plays in "Bowdlerized" versions, that is, Bowdler and folks like him rewrote the plays to avoid death story endings, and put the finishing touches on the curtains.  :D

SHERLOCK.  Publishing fanfic about Sherlock Holmes is a long and storied tradition.

OZ.  After L Frank Baum finished writing Oz books, other folks took it up, including primarily Ruth Plumly Thompson.

FAIRY TALES.  The Grimms obviously collected existing stories, whereas Hans Christian Anderson,  Charles Perrault, among others, stepped into the genre to write fairy stories.  According to the wikipedia article on fairy tales, salon women of Paris began the popular tradition of composing Fairy Tales.  My favorite is La Belle et La Bête, "redacted" by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont.

Plus every Disney movie of a fairy tale.
And the many movie versions of Shakespeare's plays.
As critics have pointed out, every performance of a play is its own, unique work of art - as is every time a literary work is read.

WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys -- a retelling of the story of Jane Eyre from the madwoman in the attic's point of view.

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? -- a famous retelling of the Odyssey.

Plus the way Star Wars and Star Trek books become canon.  Or the way that remakes retell the original story.  Or any time a movie is based on a  book. Or the way any book series with multiple authors share in interpreting a community canon.   Or the way that The Doctor becomes a new person every so often... as does James Bond....  in fact the Doctor is a kind of fusion of Holmes and Bond. :)

The way that Fantasy, as a genre, owes its existence to Tolkien.  And the way that Tolkien himself was writing mythological backstory to support his invented languages that were love affairs with Celtic and Nordic languages and mythologies.

All these things have in common, that a work of art is reacting to a pre-existing set of ideas.

Being a ballad singer and folk singer, it's also true that originality doesn't mean much to me.  With music, what I like to hear is different singers performing music -- whether it is different covers of the same song, or different songs in a related genre, or whatever!  With ballads, there are dozens of variants, and while people are interested in the "ur-text"  or what is oldest, that's not the only criterion of interest.


Fanfic rocks!  for so many reasons!!!  Proud to be part of a long tradition including many of my favorite literary authors.