Introduction: What, Where, Who is Posterity?

This introduction sets out the key questions to be explored in the volume, examining contemporaneous definitions and uses of 'posterite', and the complex temporal games that both anticipating and describing posterity entail. It considers the precariousness of relying on an unknown future public, how gaps and flexibility might enhance the likely survival of a text or its author, and how the idea of posterity (in its various configurations) acts as a motivating force, conditioning how an individual acts even as 'real' posterity continually recedes into the distance before them.