CRITICAL FICTIONS
“Critical fiction” is a term defined by Henry Wessells as, “a work of art that explicitly declares itself as a critique of another work of literature and explicitly makes use of that earlier source text.” 1 I think this kind of story has been around longer than the term, and that there is a lot of leeway in how much some works that enter the world of another work of fiction are proposing critiques. Wessells maintains that, “All fiction is critical fiction, in that all writers are — whether consciously or not — responding to the traditions and readings that have shaped their thinking.”
Some people call this “fanfic” and I suppose that fanfic can be seen as a form of critical fiction, though I don’t know how critical of the original works most pieces of fanfic are, and to apply the term fanfic to something like Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea—which tells the story of Mr. Rochester’s first marriage, before the events that occur in Jane Eyre—seems to trivialize the work.
At any rate, I’ve been interested in this form of story for a long time, and have tried quite a few versions of it. I’ll leave you to decide whether the result if fanfic or literary criticism.
1 From his introduction to My Man and Other Critical Fictions by Wendy Walker.