That said, I think to play fair with your argument, you can’t compare Pride and Prejudice to MODERN male books. You need to imagine the reaction to contemporary male authors’ works being treated like this, and honestly, I don’t think there would be that much outcry at, say, David Copperfield and Chupacabras. Or Robot Heart of Darkness. But, to some degree, I think the costume dramatization of 19th century novels has tarred them all with a girly brush. You know, they are wordy and sentimental and moralistic and often about True Love unironically and stuff– even when they’re written by dudes.

That said, despite my hypothetical assertion, you’re both quite right to note that none of those books have been tampered with yet. So, while I don’t think the Catcher in the Rye is an appropriate parallel, necessarily, your argument is still irrefutable.

I could rebut each of your points (easy to write? tell me that when I am not in the middle of in depth research on the social mores of male homosexuality in the early Byzantine empire – and yes, that’s for fanfiction), but honestly, I find the statement:

“It’s another chapter in the story of Girl Stuff Sucks and Should Be Made Into Boy Stuff Or Else Ignored.”

ironic in the middle of comment that dismisses a decidedly female-dominated type of writing for another type, with less women.

P&P&Z is not like most fanfic, or even like “Wicked”. Fanfic and Wicked pretty much NEVER include the original author’s actual writing. As I understand, PPZ is the original novel with insertions of zombie-fighting scenes. That would be like publishing and selling Romeo & Juliet, only with a sex scene. Just writing the sex scene is fanfic.

If all the original novel was chopped out of PPZ, would it be enough for a novel? Would it make most people pick it up and pay full cover price?

Probably not. Which is what I find immoral about it.

“They’re a good way to go if you don’t have the time or inclination to construct original characters, an original plot, and a compelling reality for your readers”

Other than using the characters though, I don’t see why a sequal couldn’t have an original plot and compelling reality. Those are symptoms of a bad writer, not necessarily of a spin-off or sequal.

I don’t usually read articles of authors, so don’t really know the motivations of the author when he wrote it, but I liked that he kept in so much Austen. If indeed it was because he found her unreadable, well, I find that incomprehensible, because I find her so readable.

- Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters was written by a man (the same man who wrote Android Karenina, actually).

- Jean Rhys self-identified as white, specifically Scottish and Welsh. Her self-identification as “Creole” did not mean, in the context of English-speaking Dominica of that time, that she self-identified as a person of mixed race; the word “Creole” has meant different things in different places throughout history.

However, I think it’s really unfair, Sady, to carry that critique into being so dismissive of fanfic and related endeavors. Calling working with someone else’s characters “hack work” and implying that writers who do this are too lazy to write their own characters and are deliberately profiting off of that shows a lack of familiarity with the huge (and often mostly female) fanfiction communities out there and is an awfully hasty dismissal of their creative endeavors. Most people who write fanfic etc. never make a profit off of it and never receive any recognition; also, many of them spend hours developing their thinking and practicing their writing and are in fact very talented. Fanfic can be an homage to the original creators of the characters; it can be a really interesting thought experiment; it can even tell stories that are more fun or better written or more interesting than the original stories. It shows investment in a story; it shows a lot of what-if type thinking, which is integral to good writing. And it doesn’t have a guaranteed audience – as with any writing, if it’s not good, no one’s going to read it! (Also, have you read “Wicked”? Because it goes way beyond just fiddling with the Oz characters.) In fact, I think it is telling that a kind of writing that is so heavily female is so often so rudely and summarily dismissed as derivative and unimportant.

Anyway, I am not actually involved in fanfic, although I have friends and relations who are, but FeministSF has some great posts and links on the topic, which I highly recommend you check out. http://blogs.feministsf.net/

All that said, I am loving this whole lit week theme, and I hope it goes on for a while!

How about the “Three Musketeers in the City,” the book and its sequels do focus on the sexual affairs of the heroes (and later one of their sons) so all you would have to do is ramp up the focus on fashion…err…but now that I think about the plot, the book and its sequels focus a lot on what people in the court of the sun king are wearing and their fashion accessories as they parade around.

The stuff that makes it into the movie is the sword fights, not descriptions of what lace cuffs the duke of buckingham was wearing.