Previous scholarship on classical pseudepigrapha has generally aimed at proving issues of attribution and dating of individual works, with little or no attention paid to the texts as literary artefacts. Instead, this book looks at Latin fakes as sophisticated products of a literary culture in which collaborative practices of supplementation, recasting and role-play were the absolute cornerstones of rhetorical education and literary practice. Texts such as the Catalepton, the Consolatio ad Liviam and the Panegyricus Messallae thus illuminate the strategies whereby Imperial audiences received and interrogated canonical texts and are here explored as key moments in the Imperial reception of Augustan authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Tibullus. The study of the rhetoric of these creative supplements irreverently mingling truth and fiction reveals much not only about the neighbouring concepts of fiction, authenticity, and reality, but also about the tacit assumptions by which the latter are employed in literary criticism.

In this book Craig, Kinney and their collaborators confront the main unsolved mysteries in Shakespeare's canon through computer analysis of Shakespeare's and other writers' styles. In some cases their analysis confirms the current scholarly consensus, bringing long-standing questions to something like a final resolution. In other areas the book provides more surprising conclusions: that Shakespeare wrote the 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy, for example, and that Marlowe along with Shakespeare was a collaborator on Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2. The methods used are more wholeheartedly statistical, and computationally more intensive, than any that have yet been applied to Shakespeare studies. The book also reveals how word patterns help create a characteristic personal style. In tackling traditional problems with the aid of the processing power of the computer, harnessed through computer science, and drawing upon large amounts of data, the book is an exemplar of the new domain of digital humanities.

Recent literary scholarship has seen a shift of interest away from questions of attribution. This book is the first comprehensive literary survey of the field to appear in forty years. It revisits a number of famous controversies, including those concerning the authorship of the Homeric poems, books from the Old and New Testaments, and the plays of Shakespeare. Written with wit and erudition, the study makes this intriguing field accessible for students and scholars. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The need to attribute disputed utterance constantly arises, sometimes as a matter of legal urgency (contested 'confessions' or other documents), sometimes as the focus of fierce scholarly debate (was that new story just discovered really by D...read more