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"Forgery Fiction."
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Strange bodies : a novel
A dizzying novel of deception and metempsychosis by the author of the National Book Award finalist Far North Whatever this is, it started when Nicholas Slopen came back from the dead. In a locked ward of a notorious psychiatric hospital sits a man who insists that he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, failed husband and impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar. Slopen has been dead for months. Yet nothing can make this man change his story. What begins as a tale of apparent forgery, involving unseen letters by the great Dr. Johnson, grows to encompass a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley mogul and his Russian allies to exploit the darkest secret of Soviet technology: the Malevin Procedure. With echoes of both Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick, Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.
Book
Piltdown, Realism, And Public Trust In 1950s England
Opening with the 1953 exposure of the Piltdown hoax, and its surprisingly extensive and irreverent media reception, this essay argues that public trust in national institutions was among the pressing concerns of English culture throughout the 1950s, and a recurrent theme of its major realist fiction. Focusing on novels by Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, and Angus Wilson about fraud and forgery in institutional settings, the essay proposes that questions of motivated misrepresentation allowed novelists to emphasize partiality and prejudice in historical and literary narrative in ways that anticipated the reflexivity of both modes later in the century.
Journal Article
The phantom freighter
The Hardy brothers embark on a freighter trip under mysterious circrcumstances and find themselves involved with a smuggling ring.
Book
'An Account of Burned Pepper': Yao Shilin and the Forging of Liao Dynasty History
Article Abstract: Fen jiaolu 焚椒錄 ( An Account of Burned Pepper ) purports to be an eyewitness biographical account of the life and tragic death of the Liao dynasty empress Xiao Guanyin 蕭觀音 (1040–1075). It is explicitly attributed to the authorship of Wang Ding 王鼎 (d. 1106), a senior government official, and dated to the year 1089. Many scholars have used this text as an authoritative source for understanding Liao history, and the poems which it contains, attributed to the empress, have appeared frequently in anthologies and studies of women's writings. However, this text is a late Ming dynasty forgery, produced in around 1600. This article provides a detailed examination of the manifold anachronisms in the Fenjiao lu , its close relationship with the Liao shi 遼史 ( History of the Liao Dynasty ) which was only completed in 1343, and its connections with other works of Ming dynasty fiction.
Journal Article
Arthur Miller and Shakespearean Forgery
Arthur Miller is mostly known as a playwright, but he also wrote fiction, even a children’s book, and radio plays. During the 1930s and 1940s, radio plays were a popular form of entertainment. The productions were lavish, and the actors among the most famous in the theater of the time. The salary was lucrative for Miller, who was yet to write his most famous plays. Miller’s first radio play, William Ireland’s Confession, was broadcast on 19 October 1939 on Columbia Workshop. Miller displays great familiarity with William Henry Ireland (1775–1835) and his project to present his own writing under Shakespeare’s name and to collect memorabilia allegedly belonging to the great bard. This article reviews William Henry Ireland’s story and ultimate exposure and suggests that Miller’s radio play goes beyond retelling the story to making a statement about authorship and, in an uncanny way, foreshadowing his own experiences as a playwright.
Journal Article
A Past of Possibilities
An exploration of hypothetical turning points in history
from Ancient Greece to September 11 What if history, as we
know it, had run another course? Touching on alternate histories of
the future and the past, or uchronias, A Past of
Possibilities encourages deeper consideration of watershed
moments in the course of history. Wide-ranging in scope, it
examines the Boxer Rebellion in China, the 1848 revolution in
France, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914,
and integrates science fiction, history, historiography, sociology,
anthropology, and film. In probing the genre of literature and
history that is fascinated with hypotheticals surrounding key
points in history, Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou reach
beyond a mere reimagining of history, exploring the limits and
potentials of the futures past. From the most bizarre fiction to
serious scientific hypothesis, they provide a survey of the uses of
counterfactual histories, methodological issues on the possible in
social sciences, and practical proposals for using alternate
histories in research and the wider public.
eBook
Literary history as bestseller: the life and opinions of a fraudulent philologue
In this article we reveal the publishing ventures of Octav Minar (1886-1967), one of the Romanian authors that was disesteemed by fellow literary historians on account of his counterfeiting acts such as forgery, plagiarism, plastography or trick photography. Related to the book market of interbellum Romania, Minar was frequently branded as the “man-of-the-day” while his publications followed the logic of the “hand-in-glove” ephemerides Notwithstanding the challenges of the term “bestseller,” we turned to it so as to better describe Minar’s cultural products as multiple-layered offers, catering for both low-brow and high-brow readership and seizing signals from both public’s expectations (myth-making, melodrama, sensation, narrative simplicity) and enormous patrimonial gaps (editing the classics, writing the recent authors’ biographies). After a careful examination of Minar’s works, we reached the conclusion that he was an exceptional entrepreneur of letters and, nonetheless, a literary historian endowed with a “melodramatic imagination” as well as with a playwright’s and a genre novelist’s plume. A swift intuition of marketing basics helped him realize, quite rapidly, that historical facts and documents could be merchandized: this is how his impressive collection of Romanian writers’ miscellanea was wrapped as a commodity for the public. If the juridical and moral aspects of his literary ventures were put in between brackets, we would discover an astonishing and ingenious personality who glided between different speech registers, and popularized literary history as a genre belonging to the big tent of mass culture. We should thus take into consideration that the logic of the paraliterary circuit can also be applied to literary history. Boiled down to essentials, counting on citations and on minimal critical comments, spiced with images (facsimile and pictures), Minar’s literary histories had their share in speeding the process of cultural literacy of average Romanian readers and in institutionalizing literary ideas.
Journal Article
Threads and traces
Carlo Ginzburg's brilliant and timely new essay collection takes a bold stand against naive positivism and allegedly sophisticated neo-skepticism. It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction. Interwoven with compelling autobiographical references, Threads and Traces bears moving witness to Ginzburg's life as a European Jew, the abiding strength of his scholarship, and his deep engagement with the historian's craft.
eBook
The Novel as Theory of History: Early Modern French Theories of Historical Writing
Cet article traite de la relation entre l’historiographie et le roman dans la France moderne. Il remet en cause la vision établie qui minore le rôle du roman dans le débat historiographique du dix-septième siècle et avance au contraire que la fiction en prose a joué un rôle important dans la configuration des paramètres théoriques de l’histoire (de la même manière que nous savons comment l’écriture de l’histoire détermine les origines du roman). L’examen d’une série de traités d’épistémologie de l’histoire, allant de Sorel à La Mothe Le Vayer, à Le Moyne, Saint-Réal, Saint-Évremond et Rapin permet de montrer comment le roman participe au processus de réhabilitation d’une discipline en crise. This essay is concerned with the relation between historiography and the novel in early modern France. It questions the established view that diminishes the role of the novel in the early modern historiographical debate and argues instead that prose fiction played a significant role in the configuration of the theoretical parameters of history (in the same way that we know how the writing of history determined the origins of the novel). Examining a range of treatises on epistemology of history from Sorel to La Mothe Le Vayer, Le Moyne to Saint-Réal, Saint-Évremond and Rapin, this reading of seventeenth-century theories of history explores how the novel intervened in the attempts to rehabilitate a discipline in crisis.
Journal Article