To Be Continued : Four Stories and their Survival

What happened to Chaucer's pilgrims after the poet deserted them halfway through their travels? How can the monster movies of the 1930s be seen as a continuation of the story of Prometheus? Books end, but the stories they tell continue; if they are retold often enough, they acquire the status of myth. Here, Peter Conrad traces the multiple incarnations of four pervasive stories: those of Chaucer's pilgrims, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and King Lear, and finally Prometheus. Lively, accessible, and wonderfully written, To Be Continued shows how these stories are kept alive by our constant renewals and how we recreate the past by telling its tales.