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Textual DeceptionsFalse Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era

By Sue Vice

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£100.00

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About this book

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 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

Reviews

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
Table of contents
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 Kajanë; 6. False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony; Bibliography; Index
About the author

Sue Vice

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).