Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Jack Lynch (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

236 Seiten

2016
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-138-26194-5 (ISBN)

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In the first extended treatment of the debates surrounding public deception in eighteenth-century Britain, Jack Lynch contends that forgery, fakery, and fraud make explicit the usually unspoken grounds on which Britons made sense of their world. Confrontations with inauthenticity, in other words, bring tacitly understood conceptions of reality to the surface. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary print and manuscript sources”not only books and pamphlets, but ballads, comic prints, legal proceedings, letters, and diaries”Lynch focuses on the debates they provoked, rather than the forgers themselves. He offers a comprehensive treatment of the criticism surrounding fraud in most of the noteworthy controversies of the long eighteenth century. To this end, his study is structured around topics related to the arguments over deception in Britain, whether they concerned George Psalmanazar's Formosan hoax at the beginning of the eighteenth century or William Henry Ireland's Shakespearean imposture at the end. Beginning with the question of what constitutes deception and ending with an illuminating chapter on what was at stake in these debates for eighteenth-century British thinkers, Lynch's accessibly written study takes the reader through the means”whether simple, sophisticated, or tortuously argued”by which partisans on both sides struggled to define which of the apparent contradictions were sufficient to disqualify a claim to authenticity. Fakery, Lynch persuasively argues, transports us to the heart of eighteenth-century notions of the value of evidence, of the mechanisms of perception and memory, of the relationship between art and life, of historicism, and of human motivation.

Jack Lynch is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, The State University New Jersey, USA.

Contents: Preface; Introduction; Recognizing a fake when you see one; Conviction on the first view; The utmost evidence; Truth is uniform; All manner of experience and observation; The mention of posterior facts; False recollections; Motivated malignity; Different kinds of value; Bibliography; Index.

Erscheinungsdatum	08.01.2017
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	453 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
	Recht / Steuern ► Privatrecht / Bürgerliches Recht ► Sachenrecht
	Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-138-26194-7 / 1138261947
ISBN-13	978-1-138-26194-5 / 9781138261945
Zustand	Neuware