Testamentary Acts

This literary study uncovers the strategies of self-protection and self-projection - textual and personal, before and after death - by which authors seek in old age to enhance posterity's view of themselves and their work.

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The testamentary acts of Michael Millgate's title are those strategies of self-protection and self-projection - textual and personal, before and after death - by which authors seek in old age to enhance posterity's view of themselves and their work. The four figures examined here in detail - Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy - sought to maintain their personal privacy and control the integrity of their texts by, for example, destroying documents, writing autobiographies, revising their earlier works and supplying them with retrospective prefaces, and publishing so-called `collected' editions that omitted items they no longer wished to preserve.