Continuator

A continuator, in literature, is a writer who creates a new work based on someone else's prior text, such as a novel or novel fragment. The new work may complete the older work (as with the numerous continuations of Jane Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon), or may try to serve as a sequel or prequel to the older work (such as Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett, an authorized continuation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind). This phenomenon differs from those authors who, because they share a common culture, use characters or themes from a common cultural stock.

The development of European classical literature out of the common stock of oral tradition proved conducive, to reworkings, revisions, and satires. Numerous writers of Greece's golden age revived and reworked stories of the Trojan War and Greek mythology, although they were not strictly continuators as, for the most part, they did not invent or even extrapolate much from the received stories, choosing to alter the tone and treatment rather than the stories.

Latin literature, on the other hand, may be regarded as systematic continuators of Greek models. The pinnacle of Augustan literature, the Aeneid, is essentially a continuation of the Iliad: not only in that it follows a minor character from his imagined origins in Troy to his founding of Rome, but in that it continues a historical ethos. This move, by connecting the Roman empire both culturally and pseudo-historically to the Homeric myth, is commonly viewed as a move by Virgil to legitimize the Roman empire. For instance, the epic opens with a summary of the progress of Aeneas and his progeny (in John Dryden's translation):

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