What I’m looking for is literature that takes an existing fictional work, and a different author uses the existing characters as an off-shoot.
The best example I can think of is probably Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, where Tom Stoppard takes existing Shakespearean characters, and not only fleshes out their story, but has it intersect with Hamlet, including using the actual dialogue from the Shakespearean play when it happens.
Is there a term for this? Any other examples (right off the top of my head, I think there may be a few of the Star Wars: Tales of the compilations that feature this device, but I can’t check at the moment)?
“Minor-character elaboration” and “reconfigured text” pop up in a couple of academic works, but I can’t think of or find anything more definite. TV Tropes uses “External Retcon.” The latter link has some examples in the Literature “folder” – “Grendel” by John Gardner is the only one I’ve read besides Rosencrantz. I’ve heard of Wide Sargasso Sea, Mary Reilly (or at least its movie), and The Wind Done Gone.
H.P. Lovecraft encouraged other authors to use his settings, monsters, and lore to write their own stories, and many shared in the bounty. The term in that case was the Cthulhu Mythos, although I’m not aware of *mythos *being used for any other shared literary universes.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is not exactly a pastiche, since it’s not done in the style of a Shakespeare play. It just takes characters from one. There are an infinite number of pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and other characters.
Another example I can think of is the novel Wicked and its sequels, which take the Wicked Witch of the West and other characters from The Wizard of Oz and reinterpret them.
Yup, pastiche. But don’t stop there: Stoppard frequently indulged in pastiche. Jumpers and Travesties come to mind. I like to think of Stoppard’s relationship to pastiche as akin to the difference between an American crossword puzzle and a British “cryptic” crossword: there’s always a signal thematic or concrete or conceptual difference that informs his work’s connection to the original, a puzzle to be figured out, if you care to, that offers a depth and complexity that simply choosing a style to emulate would not.
“Paraquel” is a good word, but “Pastiche” is justifiable, too. Stoppard used not merely Shakespeare’s characters and plot points but a lot of his language, words and rhythms, too. Varioussources would have no problem with the OP using the term, including this guy.
That’s kinda specifically what I’m looking for. Using the contents of a story, along with the characters, from one piece of work in another.
For instance, suppose someone took a throwaway character from “The Stand” by Stephen King, and told their story while integrating the elements of Kong’s work into the narrative, including dialogue.
I’m inclined to agree. At least I’d say that, in my mind, a “pastiche” is something different from what the OP is asking about. There ought to be a separate word for it, but I’m not sure what.
“Spin-off” is also close, but not quite right, IMHO.
I can’t tell for sure whether Stoppard is specifically denying that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a pastiche, or just denying that he originally set out to make it one.
Actually, “spin off” sounds exactly right. For instance, both “Maude” and “The Jeffersons” were spin-offs of “All in the Family”, taking a minor character, along with their history in the shared universe, and fleshing them out to create new stories.
To my mind, in the strict sense a “pastiche” is something like Sherlock Holmes stories that portray the character in a manner similar to that of the Conan Doyle stories, without re-imagining him too much. Likewise the Conan stories by L. Sprague de Camp, or the Cthulhu Mythos stores by authors other than Lovecraft.
Certainly works like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as The King of Soup indicates, are sometimes called pastiches. But they don’t follow the style of the original work, and focus on minor characters rather than on the original protagonists. This might be a subcategory of pastiche, but there doesn’t seem to be a specific term for it.
(I must take the opportunity to mention that I saw the original Broadway production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern around 1968.)
Would the “Flashman” series, taking the character from Tom Brown’s Schooldays and turning him into the main character of his own series, count for the OP? Because I’m not sure I would call those pastiche.
I thought Wide Sargasso Sea was about the most famous example of what the OP is talking about, but it’s not a pastiche since it’s about looking again at the substance of the plot of Jane Eyre, not the writing style.
It’s a form of metafiction - if it were a novel, I’d call it a “parallel novel” (like Wide Sargasso Sea parallels Jane Eyre, or The Wind Done Gone parallels Gone With The Wind). so maybe “parallel play”.