Literary Classics & Popular Fiction Assistance

Good morning ... I'm working on a library project that looks at the relationship between Great Literature (classics, canons, literary fiction, etc.) and popular fiction. As part of the project I'm putting together a list of related "reads." I've posted this to Fiction-L, and the folks on the list have been tremendously helpful, but I want to cast my proverbial net a bit wider. Here is a bit of the idea:

1) Martha Cooley, The Archivist -- works by T.S. Eliot
2) Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club -- works of Jane Austen
3) William Martin, Harvard Yard -- the works of Shakespeare

I've looked through several archived lists and found some interesting and helfpul titles. I'm most appreciative of any recommendations you might have.

My thanks,
Stephanie

What's your definition of "relatedness?" Books that offer constant commentary on another book?

Jasper Fforde is a good companion read to essentially the cannon of English Lit-Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and of course Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre).
Life of Pi is often compared to The Old Man and the Sea (however, dispising the second, I couldn't really get into the first).
I thought The Venetian's Wife was a good parallel to The Awakening.
The Rule of Four is all about a book I'd never heard of before reading it-Hypnerotomachai poliphili.
THe Dante Club relates to translating The Divine Comedy, but also to a number of American poets.
The Lightning Thief is all about Greek mythology.
I'll post more as I think of them-a bit early to think without coffee.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is essentially a modern-day American farm town retelling of Shakepeare's King Lear. You don't need to know the play to appreciate the novel, but if you read both within a fairly short time period, or are very familiar with the play, the sheer number of parallels that Smiley puts into the novel are just incredible, in my opinion.

I think there's an LT Group called Books Compared (or something similar) that might have some good discussions about these kinds of pairs.

Relatedness -- In this case I'm looking at several perspectives. First, those pop novels that substantially include literary classics, authors and/or characters as the main focus. The modern retelling of classics or parallels to them. Or pop fiction's infrastructure that can be traced back directly to the canons.

The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway are one fairly obvious pairing that hasn't been mentioned yet.

Pratchett's Lords and Ladies gloriously mixes up Hamlet and Macbeth
I don't know if they're "pop" enough, but you could look at:
David Lodge's Nice work and Mrs Gaskell's North and South; also Author, author and Henry James (even Small world and Spenser, if you want to get fancy)
Byatt's Possession and Robert Browning
Bradbury's To the Hermitage and Diderot

Ooh I was just about to say possession
Some of byatt's other stuff like virgin in the garden gloriously parodies Elizabethan poets like edmund spencer but not sure if she's 'pop culture' enough!

The vampyre gloriously retells the life history of Byron through his own poetical references.

Umm wyrd sisters parodies Macbeth.

I don't know if any of these have been mentioned before, but how about:

How about The Mists of Avalon as a retelling of Arthurian legend?

Or Politically Correct Bedtime Stories and Politically Correct Holiday Stories that play on old fairy tales and traditional holiday stories. There are actually a bunch of books about "retelling" fairy tales. Also A Wolf at the Door and other retold fairy tales and Confessions of an evil stepsister

Wicked and Son of a Witch as retellings of The Wizard of Oz

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl A mystery involving Dante scholars

Tom Perrotta's Little Children is based on Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

I'm not sure if you consider A Confederacy of Dunces a classic yet, but Andrew Fox's Fat, White Vampire Blues is an homage to it.

There's lots of updated Shakespeare - Julie and Romeo for example.

Are you looking at YA stuff as well? Enter Three Witches was a great MacBeth em... retelling? related story? hmmmm... Anyway, I think it would fit.

Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn is a science fiction version of Jane Eyre.

Paradise Lost -> His Dark Materials
Hamlet -> Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

smaata, I noticed in my last read, Barbara Michaels Someone in the House that the main character compared herself a few times to the heroine in Jane Eyre, and referred a bit to that classic. Does that help?

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is based on Jane Eyre

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey relates to Great Expectations

The Thirteenth Tale? How is it based on it? I'm interested...if you please.

-Tracey

Here are two more . . .

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) and Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding)

The Tempest (Shakespeare) and Indigo (Marina Warner)

Okay, another one came to me. The Wide Sargasso Sea is supposed to be a prequel to Jane Eyre.

Everyone has been tremendously helpful! I truly appreciate all of the recommendations. ~~Stephanie (smaatta)

Cold Comfort Farm was a mickey-take of sombre countryside tales like Precious Bane and when I read the latter, I could see the echoes clearly.

Zadie Smith On Beauty was an homage to Howard's End - again, I read that second and there was a whole HEAP of very clever echoes.

Hope that helps

The Seven Per Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, concerning Watson, Holmes, and . . .Sigmund Freud.
Northanger Abbey is Austen's part-homage to, part-parody of gothic novels from the late 18th century.
Labyrinths in which Borges "writes over" genres, including detective fiction, and has great story about a library.
The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, the famous send-up of Gone With the Wind (someone actually tried to sue Randall to prevent her from publishing it)
Kindred by Octavia Butler (science fiction writer) has a time-travel element in which a main Black woman character must go back to the time of slavery, to the book is related to classic American slave narratives, such as those by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass. Kindred was Butler's first book. Her last, Fledgling is a very fresh take on vampire novels.

There was something called the Canongate Myths Project recently where contemporary authors rewrote myths from literature. Margaret Atwood chose Homer's The Odyssey and wrote from Penelope's perspective in The Penelopiad.

Ali Smith rewrote the myth of Iphis from The Metamorphoses in Girl Meets Boy.

Hi Tracey, you asked about The Thirteenth Tale relating to Jane Eyre. I think that I mispoke by saying it was based on Jane Eyre; I should've said it has elements and characters that reflect those in Jane Eyre. There are many similar plot elements: a governess taunted by a ghostly presence which turns out to be a secret family shame, a deadly fire created by a madwoman . . . there are also many explicit references to the book Jane Eyre throughout the text as 'the silver thread' that runs through the tapestry of the story.

Thank you, archi-6.
Sounds like an interesting read, and one that I might like. I will keep that in mind. :-)

The Double Bind and The Great Gatsby.

A Study in Emerald is Neil Gaiman's take on Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett plays around a lot with threads from Les Miserables.

Wicked and The Wizard of OZ, if OZ is a classic.

The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, or even Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley and Gone With the Wind if that's a classic. (It did win a Pulitzer Prize for Margaret Mitchell in 1937.)

I'm surprised that no one yet has mentioned John Steinbeck. Tortilla Flat is a retelling of the Arthurian legend, East of Eden retells some Biblical mythology.

From London Far, a mystery novel featuring a scholar of 18th century literature; or most of the books by Edmund Crispin, which are mysteries featuring an Oxford professor who studies all manner of things.

I just finished A Cup of Tea, by Amy Ephron, which is a literary companion to the Katherine Mansfield short story of the same name.

Gregory Maguire has several titles that play on classics by telling the story from another point of view. Lost is a retelling of A Christmas Carol.
I read Before Green Gables which is a prequel to the Anne of Green Gables series. I recommend it.
There are also a few plays on Mark Twain titles, Finn (touchtone isn't working), Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher.
Another Gone with the Wind spin off is Rhett Butler's People.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz can be usefully paired with Macbeth;

Lord of the Flies is illuminated by Euripides' The Bacchae;

C. S. Lewis's marvellous Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche;

also, Brokeback Mountain pairs nicely with Alice Munro's "The Turkey Season" found in The Moons of Jupiter or her Selected Short Stories (ISBN: 0771066708)

Hi Stephanie -- Another interesting resonance is that between Rudyard Kipling's Kim and, in one direction, the Chinese classic Journey to the West (trans Anthony Yu, U of Chicago P, 1971, 2 vols.), and in the other, Paul Scott's Raj Quartet.

How about Watership Down and The Aneid?

Drood and Dickens.

Fool and King Lear.

Pride and Prejudice and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

I take it Ulysses and the odyssey doesn't count.

Oh, and there's a re-telling of A Christmas Carol from Scrooge's cat's perspective in Shivers V.