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...