Rowling threw the grenade...
Should she follow up with a nuclear warhead?
While replying on a H/Hr forum, I was racking my brain trying to think of whether an author has rewritten a book with significant changes after publication and could only think of Stephen King’s The Stand. And even then King only restored much of what had been cut - he didn’t make any changes to the outcome. So I went Googling:
Turns out there’s precedent after all, and some pretty significant examples.
Some of these on the list don’t have massive changes, mostly SF books where the author is incorporating things from the later movie version or bringing into play later scientific/cultural developments that the story would have addressed if such things had happened before.
But wow, to see The Hobbit on that list? And the fact that Tolkien was simply feeling his way with the publisher, who assumed he wanted the changes and just did it for the next edition? I wonder if it would have still happened like that in this day of email and texting for communication…
And if Rowling did decide to rework the series, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t bad company to keep. Shelley seems to have made some changes from the original 1818 edition at her publisher’s urging - the character of Elizabeth was originally Victor’s first cousin so their romance smacked of incest. But there is also a shift in tone from a story very sympathetic to the emerging class struggle to one considered more acceptable to nobility and power. Some of this may have been publisher pressure and some of it may be due to the fact that by 1831 Mary Shelley was a widow and the mother of a future baronet rather than the journalist’s daughter she was before marriage. Either way, both editions are readily available today and have fueled plenty of academic exploration.
I have said a great many times that the Potter books as published will not endure as Great Children’s Literature when compared to Lewis Carroll, Peter Pan, etc. - that in a hundred years they’ll be remembered for their enormous popularity rather than their literary quality. There’s certainly no harm in Rowling publishing a do-over: money and jobs for the publishing industry, fuel for academics, the chance to introduce a new generation of readers to the series with the publicity, and the only damage would be the tender psyches of those canon shippers who made being right more important than enjoying an entertaining story.
*whispers* Do it, Jo!
(crossposted to Tumblr)
While replying on a H/Hr forum, I was racking my brain trying to think of whether an author has rewritten a book with significant changes after publication and could only think of Stephen King’s The Stand. And even then King only restored much of what had been cut - he didn’t make any changes to the outcome. So I went Googling:
Turns out there’s precedent after all, and some pretty significant examples.
Some of these on the list don’t have massive changes, mostly SF books where the author is incorporating things from the later movie version or bringing into play later scientific/cultural developments that the story would have addressed if such things had happened before.
But wow, to see The Hobbit on that list? And the fact that Tolkien was simply feeling his way with the publisher, who assumed he wanted the changes and just did it for the next edition? I wonder if it would have still happened like that in this day of email and texting for communication…
And if Rowling did decide to rework the series, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t bad company to keep. Shelley seems to have made some changes from the original 1818 edition at her publisher’s urging - the character of Elizabeth was originally Victor’s first cousin so their romance smacked of incest. But there is also a shift in tone from a story very sympathetic to the emerging class struggle to one considered more acceptable to nobility and power. Some of this may have been publisher pressure and some of it may be due to the fact that by 1831 Mary Shelley was a widow and the mother of a future baronet rather than the journalist’s daughter she was before marriage. Either way, both editions are readily available today and have fueled plenty of academic exploration.
I have said a great many times that the Potter books as published will not endure as Great Children’s Literature when compared to Lewis Carroll, Peter Pan, etc. - that in a hundred years they’ll be remembered for their enormous popularity rather than their literary quality. There’s certainly no harm in Rowling publishing a do-over: money and jobs for the publishing industry, fuel for academics, the chance to introduce a new generation of readers to the series with the publicity, and the only damage would be the tender psyches of those canon shippers who made being right more important than enjoying an entertaining story.
*whispers* Do it, Jo!
(crossposted to Tumblr)