Six Degrees of Classics

Have you ever read a novel that references another novel you have just read? That's happened to me a couple of times, most recently with A Bend in the River, where the protagonist acts in a play in London about 'an Indian doctor who is accused of rape'. Could that be a reference to A Passage to India, which I'd just finished?

Have you noticed similar coincidences in your readings?

Yes, moden classics do have references to other novels or modern classics in the text, I do experienced in my readings. I have to do some recollection to recall the titles. I believe this occurrences are usually found in our present era - 20th and 21st modern classics. If the storyline is not similar entirely as the quoted novel/classics, there is no plaglarization, maybe just a coincidence .

"The protagonist acts in a play in London about an Indian doctor ...." , I would gather IT is just reference as stated by you.

I have across the term, a "parallel novel" or a " reimagined classics" where "vintage" classics are being "re-packaged" into another scenario or much later time in the "original" novels.

http://www.wikipedia.com

Search: Parallel Novel

This has nothing in connection to your post which I am fully awared.

I may be entirely wrong to say this:

V S Naipul, an Indian or a Jamaican(Trindad), now a British Citizen who write in Englsh have a strong influence of British's culture and tradition in him, I believe all authors other than Brits have the tendency to make references to the works of native British's author such as E M Forester in their text directly or indirectly. The "English novel"maybe an literary term is an important influence or role of English Literature. It is more obvious on novels written in English by writers who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in the British Isles regardless of his race type.

If the story happened to be "in the same vein" but not exactly entirely in the plot, references are randomly being made.

I have not read A Bend In The River by V S Naipul, but read a summary of the book. The story do bear some similarities in some aspects to A Passage To India by E M Forester. I have not read the book, but have seen a very lenghty movie about of 3 1/2 hours running time. It was many years ago in the cinema. I remember vaguely about a British married woman who went to India to visit a daughter, still a British colony who have fallen in love with an Indian's doctor. I might be incorrect. Racial discrimination was very strong at that time. I need to get hold of the book or DVD , and to recollect what have happened further in the story.

I think there is an element of racial or religious discrimination in these two novels.

A Bend in the River about a young Muslim merchant from India gripping with the discrimination and changes in an African country..

A Passage to India about three British visitors or travelers to India coping with the racial discrimination, when India was under a British's empire as one of the many colonies

From my review of The Turn of the Screw: At the start I was having Jane Eyre flashbacks - a governess, a pleasant young girl as her charge, a housekeeper for her primary company, a love interest in the handsome but absent landowner, an isolated manor in the English countryside. Henry James knows this; he is winking at us when the narrator begins to wonder whether there could be "an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?"

I'd read Jane Eyre immediately before starting this one.

Is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a re-imagined classics of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte ?

Awesome ! To read a "parallel novel " , it is interesting to discover that a classics can be repackaged into a new novel.

Jane Eyre >>> The Turn of the Screw

>2 razzamajazz:. I didn't mean that the two novels had anything in common, except the oblique reference in one to the other. I just thought it was a funny coincidence that I'd just read the first novel immediately before reading the second novel.

>5 madpoet: That was the impression I got. And yeah, that sort of thing happens to me all the time, it's really bizarre!

It's not all that surprising when a book you read takes up themes from another book you read recently: most of the time we don't pick books randomly, but follow particular interests and connections. You expect the big themes to follow you around from one book to another, and for writers to refer to each other's work.

What's sometimes more interesting is when a small detail that strikes you in one book, a reference you hadn't come across before, suddenly starts popping up in other places. Thus I didn't know about (or at least don't remember having seen any reference to) Cervantes' last written words, but in the last few weeks I've read two books in which they play an important part, Your face tomorrow and Bartleby & Co.. Not all that surprising, maybe, since I'm following a bit of a thread through Spanish literary novels, but it struck me.

>4 razzamajazz:, it got me thinking, maybe James thought Bronte should have run with the promising superstitious thread to her novel instead of bending it to romance. Maybe he figured he'd take a shot at seeing where it might go in that direction.

I have On Beauty on the top of my TBR pile, but apparently it refers to Howard's End which I haven't read. Maybe I should read that first? But then, it probably references some other classic, and so on until the Iliad or Gilgamesh...

Not novels but philosophical works.

I believe the protagonist in The Razor's Edge is discovered in a mens club library reading Pragmatism for hours on end.

My all time favorite is our beloved protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces and his constant references to Boethius.