Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era
Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era
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Abstract
This book considers a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary works that feature literary deceptions and false memories and in which the relationship between text and author is not what it seems. By exploring a variety of examples of false or embellished memoirs, purportedly autobiographical novels that are in fact thoroughly fictional, as well as bogus authorial personae, it discusses whether it is possible to judge veracity by means of textual clues alone. It also argues that literary deceptions and false memoirs have particular cultural value and significance. The accounts it features range from ‘misery memoirs’ to Holocaust testimony, poetry purportedly by a Hiroshima survivor, short stories by an Albanian civil servant and fiction by an Aboriginal woman and by a former male prostitute. The book explores why such texts arise. It considers writers' motives as well as pressures from the publishing industry, readers' tastes and contemporary social issues. It examines the contradiction between contemporary literary critics' adherence to Roland Barthes's notion of the ‘death of the author’, and the importance of the role and biography of authors in the scandals that accompany revelations of literary deception. It also looks at how such texts are constructed, and concludes with an assessment of their literary merit.
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Front Matter
- Introduction Between Text and Author
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1
Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs
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2
Gender Hoaxing: Rahila Khan, Anthony Godby Johnson and J. T. LeRoy
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3
Indigenous Envy: Wanda Koolmatrie and Nasdijj
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4
‘Falsifying Downward’: Margaret B. Jones and James Frey
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5
Self-Advertising Hoaxes: Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajanë
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6
False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony
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End Matter
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