SOURCE: “Contemporary Retellings: A Thousand Acres as the Latest Lear,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 39, No. 4, Summer, 1998, pp. 367–81.

In the following essay, Schiff discusses Smiley's rewriting of King Lear in A Thousand Acres.

In this century, and particularly since Joyce's Ulysses, numerous novels and poems have attempted to retell earlier stories, myths, and fairy tales. Between 1920 and 1980, writers such as Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner, Mann, Hermann Hesse, Max Frisch, Anthony Burgess, John Barth, Bernard Malamud, Jean Rhys, John Gardner, Donald Barthelme, Anne Sexton, John Updike, and Angela Carter have employed the “mythical method,” a term for literature that explicitly attempts to retell earlier stories that have achieved mythic significance. Although none of those writers has equaled the success and achievement of Ulysses, many notable and valuable retellings have appeared, including Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (a reworking of Jane Eyre), Updike's The Centaur (assorted Greek myths), and Gardner's...