The Pleasures of Literary Hoaxing: “…(T)he long and distinguished history of literary hoaxes shows that the average reader is often willing to put up with a lot as long as it is in the service of a good piece of writing. But hoaxes, with their vanishing authors, broken faiths, and disingenuous territories, can also be deeply disturbing, going beyond the mere ”gotcha!’ to trouble our more basic ideas about truth, lies, and literature.

In recent years, scholars have begun pursuing a more nuanced approach to discussing literary hoaxes than the knee-jerk disgruntlement of a reader scorned. Instead, literary scholars like Ohio State University professor Brian McHale and the Australian critic K.K. Ruthven are concentrating on the productive and beautifully unpredictable effects of hoaxing. Are all hoaxes the same? Should they all be judged by the same ethical standards? Do some hoaxes rise above being trifling pranks or bogus facsimiles to become serious acts of cultural criticism? What of an author’s intentions?

And finally what separates an artful hoax from an authentic piece of literature? As Ruthven wrote in his 2001 study ”Faking Literature,’ ”Literary forgery is a sort of spurious literature, and so is literature. Consequently, when we imagine the relationship between literature and literary forgeries, we should not be thinking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but rather of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.'” (Boston Globe thanks to walker)