Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760-1845

Description

British Romantic literature descends from a line of impostors, forgers and frauds. Through a series of case-studies - beginning with the golden age of forgery in the late eighteenth century and continuing through canonical Romanticism and its aftermath - Margaret Russett demonstrates how Romantic writers distinguished their fictions from the fakes surrounding them. This 2006 book examines canonical and lesser-known Romantic works alongside fakes such as Thomas Chatterton's medieval poems and 'Caraboo', the impostor-princess. Through original readings of works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Walter Scott, John Clare, and James Hogg, as well as chapters on impostors in popular culture, Russett's interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study offers a major reinterpretation of Romanticism and its continuing influence today.

Margaret Russett is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Review of the hardback: '... a stimulating and varied compendium which illuminates, though it does not fully explore, a fundamentally important aspect of Romantic literature.' The Times Literary Supplement Review of the hardback: '... one of the most stimulating books in studies in British Romanticism to have appeared in recent years. Margaret Russett succeeds in refocusing the general field of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing around the topic of literary and cultural fakes, forgeries, plagiarisms and hoaxes, which she locates at the heart of the Romantic project.' Studies in Hogg and his World