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Well known works and their less well known influences
Recently I read RM Ballantyne's "The Coral Island" because of its influence on Golding for "Lord of the Flies". That was a very worthwhile piece of contextual reading.
Now I've had to read Tennessee Williams' play "Cat on a hot tin roof" for the first time. And I can see that it provides a meaningful injection of bile into Edward Albee's "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf".
Can anyone else suggest useful connecting links?
I recognise that, inevitably, this thread may become a spoof pretty fast- so joke suggestions are welcome, as well as more serious ones!
Comments
I know there were some 18thC spoofs that were kicking around. Gothic horrors were emulated after Walpole's first of its kind - The Castle of Otranto, often with tongue firmly in cheek. Jane Austen attempted one herself in Northanger Abbey - though I seem to remember that she didn't finish editing. There's an obvious cut-off point in the text.
And then wasn't Samuel Richardson's 'Pamela' spoofed by someone who wrote 'Shamela'?
Oh, and the Arthurian legends of Chretien de Troyes were later adapted by Malory... My mind's a fog!
I recall a connection between Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Homer's The Odyssey.