In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of Canadian
authors were revealed to have faked the identities that made them
famous. What is extraordinary about these writers is that they
actually "became," in everyday life, characters they had themselves
invented. Many of their works were simultaneously fictional and
autobiographical, reflecting the duality of their identities. In
Literary Impostors, Rosmarin Heidenreich tells the intriguing stories,
both the "true" and the fabricated versions, of six Canadian authors
who obliterated their pasts and re-invented themselves: Grey Owl was
in fact an Englishman named Archie Belaney; Will James, the cowboy
writer from the American West, was the Quebec-born francophone Ernest
Dufault; the prairie novelist Frederick Philip Grove turned out to be
the German writer and translator Felix Paul Greve. Chief Buffalo Child
Long Lance, Onoto Watanna, and Sui Sin Far were the chosen identities
of three mixed-race writers whose given names were, respectively,
Sylvester Long, Winnifred Eaton, and Edith Eaton. Heidenreich argues
that their imposture, in some cases not discovered until long after
their deaths, was not fraudulent in the usual sense: these writers
forged new identities to become who they felt they really were. In an
age of proliferating cyber-identities and controversial claims to
ancestry, Literary Impostors raises timely questions involving race,
migrancy, and gender to illustrate the porousness of the line that is
often drawn between an author's biography and the fiction he or she
produces.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780773555297
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Vendor
McGill-Queen's University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter