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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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Vice, Sue, 1961- author.
Imprint:	Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2014] ©2014
Description:	1 online resource (215 pages)
Language:	English
Subject:	Literary forgeries and mystifications. Autobiography. Autobiography. Literary forgeries and mystifications. Electronic books.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11306426

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Varying Form of Title:	False memoirs and literary hoaxes in the contemporary era
ISBN:	9780748675562 0748675566 9780748675555 0748675558 1474406343 9781474406345
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-209) and index. English. Print version record.
Summary:	Textual Deceptions considers a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary works 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, Sue Vice discusses whether it is possible to judge veracity by means of textual clues alone. The accounts featured range from 'misery memoirs' to Holocaust testimony, poetry purportedly by a Hiroshima survivor, short stories by an Albanian civil servant, fiction by an Aboriginal woman and by a former male prostitute. The book explores both why such texts arise, including consideration of writers' motives as well as pressures from the publishing industry, readers' tastes and contemporary social issues, and also how such texts are constructed, concluding with an assessment of their literary merit. Key Features:. Analyses the background, literary construction and value of a wide range of recent false memoirs and literary deceptions Considers whether internal detail alone is sufficient to identify the truth-value or otherwise of a text, or if other evidence must be invoked Explores the contradiction between contemporary literary critics' adherence to Roland Barthes's notion of the 'death of the author', and the apparently supreme importance of the role and biography of authors in the scandals that accompany revelations of deception
Other form:	Print version: Vice, Sue, 1961- Textual deceptions. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2014] 9780748675555

Table of Contents:

Introduction : between text and author
Fiction and memory in misery memoirs
Gender hoaxing : Rahila Khan, Anthony Godby Johnson and J.T. LeRoy
Indigenous envy : Wanda Koolmatrie and Nasdijj
'Falsifying downward' : Margaret B. Jones and James Frey
Self-advertising hoaxes : Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajanë
False and embellished Holocaust testimony.