Forgery

Literary forgeries are usually regarded as spurious versions of genuine literature. Faking Literature 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 demonize literary forgery: literature acquires the illusion of authenticity by being dissociated from what are represented as ersatz approximations of the real thing.

Recent literary scholarship has seen a shift of interest away from questions of attribution. This book is the first comprehensive literary survey of the field to appear in forty years. It revisits a number of famous controversies, including those concerning the authorship of the Homeric poems, books from the Old and New Testaments, and the plays of Shakespeare. Written with wit and erudition, the study makes this intriguing field accessible for students and scholars.

This volume widens the perspective of the roles that records play in society. As opposed to most writings in the discipline of archives and records management, which view records from cultural, historical, and economical efficiency dimensions, this volume highlights one of the most salient features of records: the role they play as sources of accountability. The authors demonstrate that records are not mute observers and recordings of activity, rather, they are frequently objects of memory formation and erasure.

The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human. In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced by Jesus's own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners. Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various "lost scriptures"--including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus's closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus's alleged twin brother--to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various "Gnostic" sects. Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between "proto-orthodox Christians"-- those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized Christian belief--and the groups they denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame. Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, Lost Christianities is an eye-opening account of politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades before one group came to see its views prevail.

""The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd is stunningly wrought. Anyone with the slightest interest in crime or its history, in the press and sensationalism, in the cultural history of modern economic and urban life, in London or eighteenth century England could not fail to be intrigued by the stories of two identical twin brothers--one good, happily married and respectable, the other not so good and living with a courtesan--who die hand-in-hand on the gallows. Are they the victims of their own corruption, or of the wiles of the wicked Mrs. Rudd? This book is micro-history at its best."--Thomas Laqueur, author of "Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

"Dee-li-cious!!! Immensely readable, this delectable true-crime story of eighteenth-century forgery, deceit, and ambition casts light on a wide range of socially significant sites, from the credit market to the world of fashion, from the law court to the imperial stage. "The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd is a tour de force of historical scholarship, and it's an engrossing story as well."--Mary Poovey, author of "A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society