Prequel
A prequel is a literary, dramatic or cinematic work whose story precedes that of a previous work, by focusing on events that occur before the original narrative.[1] A prequel is a work that forms part of a backstory to the preceding work.
For the mobile application, see Prequel (mobile application). For the book, see Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.
The term "prequel" is a 20th-century neologism from the prefix "pre-" (from Latin prae, "before") and "sequel".[2][3]
Like sequels, prequels may or may not concern the same plot as the work from which they are derived. More often they explain the background that led to the events in the original, but sometimes the connections are not completely explicit. Sometimes prequels play on the audience's knowledge of what will happen next, using deliberate references to create dramatic irony.
History[edit]
Though the word "prequel" is of recent origin, works fitting this concept existed long before. The Cypria, presupposing hearers' acquaintance with the events of the Homeric epic, confined itself to what preceded the Iliad, and thus formed a kind of introduction.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "prequel" first appeared in print in 1958 in an article by Anthony Boucher in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, used to describe James Blish's 1956 story They Shall Have Stars, which expanded on the story introduced in his earlier 1955 work, Earthman Come Home. However, Christopher Tolkien, writing about the history of The Silmarillion in 1977, claims that his father, J. R. R. Tolkien, "coined the highly uncharacteristic word 'prequel'" when badgered for a definition of the relationship between The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion sometime after 1955.[4][5]
The term came into general usage in the 1970s and 1980s.[3]
Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979) may have introduced the term "prequel" into the mainstream.[6] The term has since been popularized by the Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999–2005).[7]
An example of a prequel would be C. S. Lewis's children's book, The Magician's Nephew, published in 1955, that explained the creation of Narnia - the subject of Lewis's seven-book series The Chronicles of Narnia, which began with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950.
The Adventures of Ben Gunn, a 1956 novel by R. F. Delderfield was written as a prequel to the novel Treasure Island.