Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

This book offers to delineate a key phenomenon in contemporary Anglophone fiction: novel expansion, when the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before, after or during the narrative time of the source-text. If autographic and allographic sequels are almost as old as literature, prequels – that imagine the anteriority of a narrative – and coquels – that develop secondary characters in the same story time as the source-text – are more recent. The overall trend for novel expansion spread in the mid-1980s and 1990s and has since shown no sign of abating.

This volume is organised following three types of relationships to the source-texts even if these occasionally combine to produce a more complex structure. This book comprises 11 essays, preceded by an introduction, that examine narrative strategies, aesthetic, ethical and political tendencies underlying these novel expansions. Following the overview provided in the introduction, the reader will find case studies of prequels, coquels and sequels before a final chapter that encompasses them all and more.

Armelle Parey is assistant professor at the University of Caen-Normandie, France. She has published a number of articles on narrative endings, memory and rewritings of the past in contemporary English-speaking fiction. She has co-edited collections of essays and guest-edited special issues on the question of narrative closure in fiction and film: Re-Writing Jane Eyre (La Revue LISA 4.4, 2006); Happy Endings and Films (Houdiard, 2010); Literary Happy Endings, Closure for Sunny Imaginations (Shaker Verlag, 2012); L’Inachevé ou l’ère des possibles dans la littérature anglophone, Récits ouverts et incomplets (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2014); Character Migration in Anglophone Literature (E-rea 13.1, 2015). She is currently co-editing a collection on screen adaptations of literary endings. She has also guest-edited with Isabelle Roblin: A.S. Byatt, Before and after Possession: Recent Critical Approaches (Book Practices and Textual Itineraries 8, Presses Universitaires de Nancy-Editions de Lorraine, 2017).