Textual Deceptions

Argues that literary deceptions and false memoirs have particular cultural value and significanceTextual 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