Cultures of Forgery Making Nations, Making Selves

In "Cultures of Forgery," leading literary studies and cultural studies scholars examine the double meaning of the word "forge"-to create or to form, on the one hand, and to make falsely, on the other. Eleven essays take on a broad range of topics, including counterfeit Hitler diaries, the creation of national identity in Bohemia, and Jean-Etienne Liotard's fabricated "Turkish" identity. Each asks how forgery-a process at times deceptive, at times creative-has shaped modern culture and challenged our understandings of authorship and value.

CONTENTS List of Figures Preface PART ONE: Forging Nations 1. Forging Truth in Medieval England 2. Forging a Past: The Sybilline Books and the Making of Rome 3. Forging Czechs: The Reinvention of National Identity in Bohemian Lands 4. Eclectic Fabrication: St. Petersburg and the Problem of Imperial Architectural Style 5. Forging Catalonia, or The Blankness of Dali PART TWO: Forging Selves 6. The Art of Forging Music and Musicians 7. Jean-Etienne Liotard's Envelopes of Self 8. Wrestling with Representation: Reforging Images of the Artist in the Russian Avant-garde 9. After the Death of the Author: The Fabrication of Helen Demidenko 10. Facts and Writing: Problems of Memory in Recent Memoirs 11. The Fascination of a Fake: The Hitler Diaries

Alfred Thomas is Professor of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Head of Department. From 1996 to 2002 he was John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of four books, the most recent of which are Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310-1420 (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Embodying Bohemia: Questions of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture (forthcoming, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Judith Ryan is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Umschlag und Verwandlung (on Rilke's poetry; 1972), The Uncompleted Past: Postwar German Novels and the Third Reich (1983), The Vanishing Subject:Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (1991), and Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (1999). She has also written articles on such authors as Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Christa Wolf, and Günter Grass. She is currently at work on a book about the relation of the contemporary novel to literary theory.