Retellings That We Have Read

In prepping the post about James, I started thinking about what other books we have read that can be characterized as retellings of other famous works.  A few popped into mind: Wicked, Demon Copperhead, Wide Sargasso Sea.  But for completeness sake, I asked ChatGPT to look at our reading list and identify all the retellings in our repertoire:

Title	Source	What kind of retelling?
Wicked — Gregory Maguire	L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	Alternate character's perspective / revisionist prequel. The Wicked Witch of the West becomes Elphaba, the protagonist, and Maguire reconstructs Oz's politics, religion and history around her. It asks, essentially, what if the "wicked witch" wasn't really wicked? This is probably the purest example of the form on your list. (New York Public Library)
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle — David Wroblewski	Shakespeare, Hamlet	Modern transposition. Hamlet is moved to rural Wisconsin and a family of dog breeders. Edgar = Hamlet; his murdered father and suspicious uncle reproduce the central family structure and revenge plot. It's quite deliberately a Hamlet retelling. (Wikipedia)
The Robber Bride — Margaret Atwood	Brothers Grimm, "The Robber Bridegroom"	Gender-reversed modern retelling. Atwood turns the murderous male bridegroom into Zenia, a predatory woman who "devours" the men belonging to three female friends. The perspective belongs to the women who have been victimized by her. (PenguinRandomhouse.com)
East of Eden — John Steinbeck	Genesis: Cain and Abel (and Adam and Eve)	Modern/biblical transposition. Steinbeck reenacts Cain and Abel twice, first through Charles and Adam and then more explicitly through Cal and Aron. The names, sibling rivalry, rejected offering, question of moral choice and even the title announce the connection. It's not merely an allusion—the biblical narrative provides the novel's structural skeleton. (PenguinRandomhouse.com)
The Historian — Elizabeth Kostova	Bram Stoker, Dracula	Sequel/reinvention/modern extension. Rather than replaying Stoker's plot with equivalent characters, Kostova supposes that Dracula is real and still exists in the modern world. Stoker's novel itself effectively exists within Kostova's world. Critics have nevertheless explicitly called it a "retelling" and an update of Dracula. (Hachette Book Group)
The Sound of Waves — Yukio Mishima	Longus, Daphnis and Chloe	Cultural transposition of an ancient Greek romance. Mishima takes the pastoral story of two innocent young lovers and relocates its basic pattern to a remote Japanese fishing island. This one is easy to miss if you don't know the ancient source. Scholars identify Daphnis and Chloe as a principal classical model. (LitCharts)
The Testament of Mary — Colm Tóibín	The New Testament Gospels	Familiar story from a marginalized character's perspective. Tóibín gives Mary her own first-person-ish counter-narrative of Jesus's ministry and crucifixion. His Mary does not accept the disciples' developing interpretation of her son as Messiah. In that sense, it operates much like Wicked: a famous story is destabilized by allowing a character in the original to tell it differently. (Wikipedia)
Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys	Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre	Prequel + other character's perspective + postcolonial revision. This is another quintessential retelling. Rhys takes Rochester's unnamed/deranged Caribbean wife, "Bertha Mason," gives her the identity Antoinette Cosway, and tells the story that Jane Eyre leaves out—her childhood, marriage to Rochester and journey toward the attic at Thornfield. (Wikipedia)
Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver	Dickens, David Copperfield	Modernized transposition. Dickens's Victorian England becomes contemporary Appalachia; Victorian child poverty and exploitation become foster care, rural poverty and the opioid epidemic. Characters and plot episodes have recognizable Dickens counterparts, beginning with David Copperfield → Demon Copperhead. (SparkNotes)
The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov	Goethe's Faust + the Gospels	Hybrid reworking rather than a straightforward retelling. Woland/Mephistopheles and Margarita/Margarete place the novel in the Faust tradition, but Bulgakov radically rearranges the roles rather than reproducing Goethe's plot. Meanwhile the embedded Pilate/Ieshua narrative explicitly rewrites the Gospel account of Jesus and Pontius Pilate. So I would call this a double literary reworking, not a simple retelling. (JBC Commons)
James — Percival Everett	Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Retelling from another character's perspective. Everett retells Twain's novel from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who travels down the Mississippi with Huck. The major characters and events of Twain's story remain recognizable, but Jim—renamed James—is given an interior life, agency, intelligence, and a story of his own, radically changing the meaning of the original narrative.

I note that we have read both the original and the retelling of the following:

• Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre
• The Historian and Dracula
• Huckleberry Finn and James