Afterlife

Afterlife: The Strange Fate of Literary Remains explores what happens to a body of work left unpublished or unfinished at the time of a writer’s death.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Ellison’s achievement when, after his endlessly reworked second novel finally made it into print in 1999, it was then superseded, in 2010, by another version?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.