Postmortem Postmodernists : The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative

This book scrutinizes the genre of the author-as-character with respect to three broad issues–authorship, the posthumous, and cultural revisionism–that arise in reading such works from a contemporary perspective. Late twentieth-century fiction 'postmodernizes' romantic and modern authors not only to understand them better, but also to understand itself in relation to a past (literary tradition, aesthetic paradigms, cultural formations, etc.) that has not really passed. Penelope Fitzgerald's 'The Blue Flower', Peter Ackroyd's 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton', Peter Carey's 'Jack Maggs', Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours', Colm Toibin's 'The Master', and Geoff Dyer's 'Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence - 'the mighty dead' (Harold Bloom) are brought back to life, reanimated and bodied forth in new textual bodies that project a postmodern understanding of the author as a historically and culturally contingent subjectivity constructed along the lines of gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality.

This book scrutinizes the genre of the author-as-character with respect to three broad issues–authorship, the posthumous, and cultural revisionism–that arise in reading such works from a contemporary perspective. Late twentieth-century fiction ''postmodernizes'' romantic and modern authors not only to understand them better, but also to understand itself in relation to a past (literary tradition, aesthetic paradigms, cultural formations, etc.) that has not really passed. Penelope Fitzgerald''s ''The Blue Flower'', Peter Ackroyd''s ''The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton'', Peter Carey''s ''Jack Maggs'', Michael Cunningham''s ''The Hours'', Colm Toibin''s ''The Master'', and Geoff Dyer''s ''Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence - ''the mighty dead'' (Harold Bloom) are brought back to life, reanimated and bodied forth in new textual bodies that project a postmodern understanding of the author as a historically and culturally contingent subjectivity constructed along the lines of gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality.