IdleRich
IdleRich
Does two books featuring or referring to the same character or thing count as a universe? Maybe it does, or I'd say it means that those two books clearly exist in the same world/universe and so this happening implies that such a universe exist and these books are references to it - but they are not themselves taking the time to create the universe, they are not describing it or its rules (beyond what they happen to say naturally in the course of the book). It's quite an interesting idea that simply by mentioning a character in another book you call a universe into existence. Or would it be more correct to say that all novels call a universe into existence and by mentioning a character from another book you are simply collapsing the universes together and in fact saying that normally two books bring two universes into existence, but here they only bring one.A few examples in gothic literature and penny dreadfuls. There's a bit in Matthew Lewis' "The Monk" where The Wandering Jew makes a guest appearance. And then, the villian in "The Monk" comes back to possess a London widower in Dion Fortune's "The Goat Foot God".
Think Mick Norman's "Angels From Hell" has someone turn on a radio with a news report about Jerry Cornelius falling overboard his yacht.
Used to also like Richard Allen's bizarre universe where the dominant music weekly was SPINS (which Stewart Home later co-opted).
There's quite a lot to think about here. Like if you read a book set in modern day UK, then do you say it takes place in our universe or has it created a very similar parallel universe that is the same as ours except the events of the book happen? Probably a completely pointless distinction but I find it interesting. A weird one is Sopranos where they mention the band Four Seasons... but later on Frankie Valli turns up as an actor playing someone else... so what's going on here? Does the band have a different singer in Sopranos universe? Or do we assume the singer moonlights as a mobster and noone noticed?
Ok I don't want to get too deep into that cos I could probably think of loads of similar conundrums that would make my head hurt and yet be pointless and perhaps incredibly boring.
Anyway, a famous sort of gothic example is the Jane Eyre/Wide Sargasso Sea universe
"Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Antoinette is caught in a patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica."