Literary forgeries are usually regarded as spurious versions of genuine literature. Faking Literature, first published in 2001, argues that the production of a literary forgery is an act that reveals the spurious nature of literature itself. Literature has long been under attack because of its alliance with rhetoric (the art of persuasion) rather than with logic and ethics. One way of deflecting such attacks is to demonise literary forgery: literature acquires the illusion of authenticity by being dissociated from what are represented as ersatz approximations of the real thing. Ruthven argues that literary forgery is the creative manifestation of cultural critique. As a powerful indictment of dubious practices in such activities as literary criticism, book-reviewing and the awarding of literary prizes, literary forgery merits serious attention from cultural analysts, and should be a key component of literary studies. This intriguing book will be of interest to all teachers, students and readers of English literature.
Dialectologgy was one of the triumphs of Victorian scholarship. Yet anthologists .argely ignore Victorian dialect poetry. Its marginality is attributed to the teaching of standard English in schools, metropolitan and middle-class condescension towars regional and working-class speech, and the impossibility of representing phonological variance in a print culture without resorting to bizarre spellings or phonetic symobls. Apropos William Barnes's Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect (1844), this paper argues that new media technologies will extend the present aural range of Victorian poetry by enabling dialect poems to be heard effortlessly instead of read laboriously.
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