A01=Sue Vice
Alan Sokal
Author_Sue Vice
Binjimin Wilkorminski
Category=DSBH
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ern Malley
false memory
holocaust
James Frey
literary hoax
Misha Defonseca
Rahila Khan
Product details
- ISBN 9780748675555
- Weight: 471g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 08 Oct 2014
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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
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).
