Afterlife - by David Wyatt

About the Book

"Afterlife: The Strange Fate of Literary Remains is a book about what happens to a body of work left unpublished or unfinished at the time of a writer's death. In nine chapters, David Wyatt tells the story of the "afterlife" of works by Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, and Ralph Ellison--of the strange and unpredictable ways in which literature that might never have seen print managed to fight its way onto the page. Posthumously edited texts raise important issues about the meaning and shape of a literary career. How is one to assess the arc of Ellison's achievement when, after his endlessly reworked second novel finally made it into print in 1999, it was then superseded, in 2010, by another version of it? Meanwhile, the posthumous publications of three Hemingway books undid any notion of the author as having suffered some sort of decline late in life, and the gender-bending experiments in The Garden of Eden cast a revisionary light back on what had become a deeply reductive belief in the Hemingway Code. While judgments about these matters may begin as technical, Wyatt shows that they eventually become aesthetic and, finally, ethical. Despite the difficulties involved, such judgments continue to be made and to produce the editions that teachers are required to choose among. Throughout Afterlife, Wyatt stresses the importance of care in the editing of posthumous texts: being careful to honor an author's literary remains by providing an answerable reading of them, while also caring enough about the work left behind to take a position on the printed form it might best take or, if such a conclusion feels impossible, to give a responsible account of why it remains out of reach"--

Book Synopsis

Afterlife: The Strange Fate of Literary Remains explores what happens to a body of work left unpublished or unfinished at the time of a writer's death. In nine chapters, David Wyatt tells the story of the "afterlife" of texts by Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, and Ralph Ellison--and of the improbable and unpredictable ways in which literature that might never have seen publication managed to end up on the printed page.

Posthumously edited texts raise important issues about the meaning and shape of a literary career. How is one to assess the arc of Ellison's achievement when, after his endlessly reworked second novel finally made it into print in 1999, it was then superseded, in 2010, by another version? Meanwhile, the publication of four Hemingway books after the author's death undid any notion that the writer suffered some sort of decline late in life, and the gender-bending experiments in The Garden of Eden cast a revisionary light back on what had become a deeply reductive belief in the Hemingway Code. While judgments about these writings may begin as technical matters, Wyatt shows that they eventually become aesthetic and, finally, ethical considerations. Despite the difficulties involved, such evaluations continue to be made and to produce the editions that teachers and readers are required to choose among.

Throughout Afterlife, Wyatt stresses the attentiveness needed in the editing of posthumous texts: being mindful to honor an author's literary remains by providing an answerable reading of them, while also caring enough about the work left behind to take a position on the printed form it might best take or, if such a conclusion feels impossible, to give a responsible account of why it is out of reach.

Review Quotes

"An excellent book. One feels as if one is in the presence of a master teacher, a talented lecturer, a first-rate storyteller."--James L. W. West III, author of Business Is Good: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Writer and general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

About the Author

David Wyatt is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, where he was a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. His previous books include Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California and Hemingway, Style, and the Art of Emotion. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.