Twice-told tales

In my latest post over at Spot-on, I ask: What compels a novelist to try to retell another writer's story? I can imagine a number of reasons to take as one's inspiration a well-known story, including: as an homage, as a goof or a spoof, to expose the ideological or political underpinnings of the original work, or simply because the earlier story is so good that mimicking it is irresistible.From