
Textual Deceptions
False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era
Sue Vice(Author)
Edinburgh University Press
Published on 8. October 2014
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-0-7486-7555-5 (ISBN)
Description
Argues that literary deceptions and false memoirs have particular cultural value and significance
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 deceptionsConsiders whether internal detail alone is sufficient to identify the truth-value or otherwise of a text, or if other evidence must be invokedExplores 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
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 deceptionsConsiders whether internal detail alone is sufficient to identify the truth-value or otherwise of a text, or if other evidence must be invokedExplores 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
Reviews / Votes
Discussing everything from misery memoirs to "indigenous envy," and from gender hoaxes to embellished Holocaust tales, Sue Vice uncovers a rich vein of deception in contemporary literature. Original and authoritative, Textual Deceptions will be of interest to scholars and students of fiction and non-fiction--and to those interested in the blurred boundaries between them. --Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization * Michael Rothberg *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
522 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7486-7555-5 (9780748675555)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
10/2014
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€0.00
Available for download
Person
Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her publications include the co-edited volume Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013), Shoah (BFI Film Classics, 2011), Jack Rosenthal (MUP, 2009), Children Writing the Holocaust (Palgrave, 2004), Holocaust Fiction (Routledge, 2000), and Introducing Bakhtin (MUP, 1997). She is also the editor of Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (Polity Press 1996).
Content
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Between Text and Author; 1. Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs; 2. Gender Hoaxing: Rahila Khan, Anthony Godby Johnson and J. T. LeRoy; 3. Indigenous Envy: Wanda Koolmatrie and Nasdijj; 4. 'Falsifying Downward': Margaret B. Jones and James Frey; 5. Self-advertising Hoaxes: Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajane; 6. False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony; Bibliography; Index