Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions examines the possible motivations behind the production of apocryphal Christian texts. Did the authors of Christian apocrypha intend to deceive others about the true origins of their writings? Did they do so in a way that is distinctly different from New Testament scriptural writings? What would phrases like "intended to deceive" or "true origins" even mean in various historical and cultural contexts? The papers in this volume, presented in September 2015 at York University in Toronto, discuss texts from as early as second-century papyrus fragments to modern apocrypha such as tales of Jesus in India in the nineteenth-century Life of Saint Issa. The highlights of the collection include a keynote address by Bart Ehrman ("Apocryphal Forgeries: The Logic of Literary Deceit") and a panel discussion on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, reflecting on what reactions to this particular text--primarily on biblioblogs--can tell us about the creation, transmission, and reception of apocryphal Christian literature. The eye-opening papers presented at the panel caution and enlighten readers about the ethics of studying unprovenanced texts, the challenges facing female scholars both in the academy and online, and the shifting dynamics between online and traditional print scholarship.

Right from the beginning, classical literature has been embroiled with questions of authenticity, fakes, frauds, and, of course, scandal. Issues of dubious authorship, and contested authority confront philologists, critics and publishers today as surely as they did in the classical era itself. The new era of postmodernism, however, encourages us to look at the work of the forger with fresh eyes, and recent scholarship reflects this in an interdisciplinary approach which goes well beyond the conventional academic endeavor to separate the authentic from the fake. Fakes and Forgers of Classical Literature comprises essays from an international cast of scholars who, in their diverse and creative approaches to questions of authenticity both old and new, radically revise the position of the forged text in the literary tradition and, in light of modern approaches of philology and literary criticism, offer exciting new strategies for understanding forgery and the play with authenticity within ancient literature itself.

Credulity -- Reference by artifact -- Germany and "Renaissance"--Forgery -- Replica -- Fiction -- Re-enactment.

An in-depth analysis of Roman literary fakes offering new insights into the creative dynamics of spurious literature.

What can contemporary media fandoms, like Anne Rice, Star Wars, Batman, or Sherlock Holmes, tell us about ancient Christianity? Tom de Bruin demonstrates how fandom and fan fiction are both analogous and incongruous with Christian derivative works. The often-disparaging terms applied to Christian apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, such as fakes, forgeries or corruptions, are not sufficient to capture the production, consumption, and value of these writings. De Bruin reimagines a range of early Christian works as fan practices. Exploring these ancient texts in new ways, he takes the reader on a journey from the 'fix-it fic' endings of the Gospel of Mark to the subversive fan fictions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and from the densely populated storyworld of early Christian art to the gatekeeping of Christian orthodoxy. Using theory developed in fan studies, De Bruin revisits fundamental questions about ancient derivative texts: Why where they written? How do they interact with more established texts? In what ways does the consumption of derivative works influence the reception of existing traditions? And how does the community react to these works? This book sheds exciting and new light on ancient Christian literary production, consumption and transmission.

The increase in fake news, the growing influence on elections, increasing false reports and targeted disinformation campaigns are not least a consequence of advancing digitalisation. Information technology is needed to put a stop to these undesirable developments. With intelligent algorithms and refined data analysis, fakes must be detected more quickly in the future and their spread prevented. However, in order to meaningfully recognize and filter fakes by means of artificial intelligence, it must be possible to distinguish fakes from facts, facts from fictions, and fictions from fakes. This book therefore also asks questions about the distinctions of fake, factual and fictional. The underlying theories of truth are discussed, and practical-technical ways of differentiating truth from falsity are outlined. By considering the fictional as well as the assumption that information-technical further development can profit from humanities knowledge, the authors hope that content-related, technical and methodological challenges of the present and future can be overcome.

I am aware that, once my pen intervenes, I can make whatever I like out of what I was.' Paul Valéry, Moi. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of impersonality; a rejection of auto/biography. But most of the major works of European modernism and postmodernism engage in very profound and central ways with questions about life-writing. Max Saunders explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction. He identifies a wave of new hybrid forms from the late nineteenth century and uses the term 'autobiografiction' - discovered in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 - to provide a fresh perspective on turn-of-the-century literature, and to propose a radically new literary history of Modernism. Saunders offers a taxonomy of the extraordinary variety of experiments with life-writing, demonstrating how they arose in the nineteenth century as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography, in works by authors such as Pater, Ruskin, Proust, 'Mark Rutherford', George Gissing, and A. C. Benson. He goes on to look at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as Impressionism turns into Modernism, juxtaposing detailed and vivacious readings of key Modernist texts by Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf, with explorations of the work of other authors - including H. G. Wells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis - whose experiments with life-writing forms are no less striking. The book concludes with a consideration of the afterlife of these fascinating experiments in the postmodern literature of Nabokov, Lessing, and Byatt. Self Impression sheds light on a number of significant but under-theorized issues; the meanings of 'autobiographical', the generic implications of literary autobiography, and the intriguing relation between autobiography and fiction in the period.

“The essays gathered in this volume demonstrate that studying early modern European literary forgeries is a fascinating cultural adventure” (Lina Bolzoni author of The Gallery of Memory). This comprehensive study of literary and historiographical forgery goes well beyond questions of authorship. It spotlights the imaginative vitality of forgery and its sinister impact on genuine scholarship. This volume demonstrates that early modern forgery was a literary tradition in its own right, with distinctive connections to politics, Greek and Roman classics, religion, philosophy, and modern literature. The early modern explosion in forgery of all kinds—particularly in the fields of literary and archaeological falsification—demonstrates a dramatic shift in attitudes toward historical evidence and in the relation of texts to contemporary society. The authors capture the impact of this evolution within many cultural transformations, including the rise of print, changing tastes and fortunes of the literary marketplace, and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The thirteen essays draw on Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva, the world’s premier research collection dedicated exclusively to the subject of literary forgery. It consists of several thousand rare books and unique manuscript materials from the early modern period and beyond. Contributors: Frederic Clark, James Coleman, Richard Cooper, Arthur Freeman, Anthony Grafton, A. Katie Harris, Earle A. Havens, Jack Lynch, Shana D. O’Connell, Ingrid Rowland, Walter Stephens, Elly Truitt, Kate Tunstall

Deep Fakes: Algorithms and Society focuses on the use of artificial intelligence technologies to produce fictitious photorealistic audiovisual clips that are indistinguishable from traditional video media. For over a century, the indexical relationship of the photographic image, and its related media of film and video, to the scene of capture has served as a basis for truth claims. Historically, the iconicity of these images has featured a causal traceback to actual light rays in a particular time and space, which were fixed by chemical reactions or digital sensors to the resultant image. Today, photorealistic audiovisual media can be generated from deep learning networks that sever any connection to an actual event. Should society instantiate new regimes to manage this new challenge to our sense of reality and the traditional evidential capacities of the ‘mechanical image’? How do these images generate information disorder while also providing the basis for legitimate tools used in entertainment and creative industries? Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policymakers, journalists and the general reading public, will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions posed by deep fake research from Communication, International Studies, Writing and Rhetoric.