Students, scholars, bloggers, reviewers, fans, and book-group members write about literature, but so do authors themselves. Through the ways they engage with their own texts and those of other artists, writers reflect on and inspire questions about the creative process. We will examine Mary Shelley’s shaping of Frankenstein (1818) from the dark materials of Milton’s Paradise Lost, German fairy tales, tales of scientific discovery, and her husband’s poems; Melville’s redesign of a nautical travel adventure into a Gothic novella in Benito Cereno (1856); and Alison Bechdel’s rewriting of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in her graphic novel Fun Home (2006).
