Textual Deceptions ─ False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era

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.

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).