You might think about books which were written in response
to or imitation of each other. For example, Virgil's Aenid continues the story of the
character Aeneas who is known from the Iliad. Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a resetting
of Flaubert's Madame Bovary in the United States. Jean Rhys' The Wide Sargasso Sea tells
the story of Jane Eyre from the point of view of Bertha Mason. Derek Walcott's Omeros
transplants the Odyssey to the Carribean.
One way to look
for examoles would be to take a poem like the Homeric epics and look at works which
respond to it over the centuries from Virgil through the present. Tennyson wrote several
poems responding to Homer but shiftinbg time or point of view (Lotos Eaters, Ulysses,
etc) and recent feminists have done the same (see e.g. Atwood's Siren Song). Choose one
possible work and look at how it responds to an earlier work and the ways it is similar
and different.
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