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Because I couldn't remember what I wanted to say in class. And late because I apparently never finished writing this and submitting it.

On resurrecting fringe characters:

The woman/the African in a Eurocentric market: While I haven't read The Joys of Motherhood, I have read a play, "Anowa", by Ama Ata Aidoo which takes a folktale and tells it in a form of the oral tradition (which is in itself a conscious criticism of African society and the Western influence). http://www.enotes.com/anowa/ It's been a few years since I've read it, but it does reclaim to some degree, the telling of post-colonialism through a more female-centric view (though whether the piece is a feminist one or not is debated).

Fictional characters: Having come to some degree of fame over the past few years, Jasper Fforde writes books about fictional characters. "Poppycock, that's what all fiction authors do!"-- except his novels actually contain other people's fictional characters (classics and nursery rhymes mainly)- and they're the characters who police the books to make sure nothing gets buggered up in novel when the characters go AWOL etc.

His first novel was The Eyre Affair and yes. It is about that Eyre.

Basically, he makes an entire world of characters using already-created characters and labels them as fictional. And then he has the "real world" which is also fictional because he's writing it and it has distinct differences from the world in which we live (and there are more layers of "real" within that)... and relatively bad things happen when too much of them overlaps, so there are policing organizations on either side to make sure that they don't leak in too much. There is also a fantastic blurring of genres from metafiction, classic fantasy and sci-fi, classic literature, verse, and parody. But I really think I'm just getting excited now.

Have a few links: http://www.thursdaynext.com/index2.html

http://www.nurserycrime.co.uk/home.html

http://www.jasperfforde.com/

Click around-- he's created a virtual world to some degree- based on his "real" made in his writing but also incorporating some pictures of the actual world in which we live--, which is slightly entertaining even if one doesn't know the story.

Oh yes, and a note on the real: Gaiman's Neverwhere and the BBC radio play Undone both rather play with writing one world as real and the other as false and looks at the interplay between them, while the reader sits in their own world altogether separate from either (but still aligning themselves with the "real" written world which is available also in spoken and visual media forms, extracting the reader even further from a true real).