Laura E. Savu's ambitious book foregrounds the literary "afterlife" of a number of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth century "predecessors" (Novalis, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Chatterton, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf) as reenacted in the pseudo-memoirs and novels of "second generation" British and American post-modernists. Central to Savu's argument is the concept of "author fiction," defined broadly as "authors and what they are, as well as were like; authors and the words they create; authors and fiction written about them." Savu's book proposes to work out the "literary, cultural, and theoretical implications of 'author fictions' with respect to three broad issues -- authorship, the posthumous, and rewriting." In other words, this book is concerned with the "fictional uses of historical authors" and their theoretical and cultural implications for "theories of authorship, the practice of rewriting," the posterity of key author figures, and the relationship between postmodernism and earlier aesthetic and cultural paradigms.
The fact is relevant that Laura Savu's own professional biography is intimately connected with forms of rewriting and reinvention, as she moved from Romania to the US and back to Romania, where she taught post-modern literature, drama, and film at the University of Bucharest. The book she has written draws on a wealth of experiences and readings, expanding our understanding of authorship and its revisionist impact on the literature of later generations. Her solid grounding in theories of authorship, textuality, (re)reading, and reconstruction of a past as a figure of the present has allowed her to write a seminal book on the dialogue between "classical" and "post-modern" texts in which the precursor text prefigures its successor and the latter expands the precursor in subtle and revealing ways, without imposing "a retroactive perception" upon it.
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