This is the first book-length study on how authors of color present themselves in public literary discourse. The study utilizes data obtained from and around exemplary empirical case study participants – Junot Diaz, Madeleine Thien, and Mohsin Hamid. Relevant data includes the case study authors’ Twitter usage and the impact of the digital sphere in author self-presentation. Dr Iyer employs a combined theoretical framework of discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, with an awareness of literary and creative writing studies. The theoretical approach uses four metapragmatic stereotypes regarding what constitutes an ‘authentic’ author. The theoretical approach and metapragmatic stereotype form an evaluative framework that can be applied on diverse data to replicate findings. The study originated from the author’s own exposure to prevailing literary discourse through public engagements as a writer. She became aware of the problematic nature of an author’s public self-presentation, with a requirement to ‘be yourself’. Each celebrity author of color faces a paradoxical positioning within literary discourse as a result of that requirement. Through her study, Dr Iyer sought to discover how authors of color negotiate themselves in public spheres, including digital social media platforms, in order to accomplish ‘authenticity’ discursively. This book is ideal for learners and practitioners in creative writing who are seeking strategies for self-presentation as published authors. It is also valuable for researchers in discourse analysis, including literary discourse and social media discourse, providing an empirical means of evaluating ‘authenticity’ as understood in contemporary times.

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as the Academy Award-winning AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before. In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity. Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of individual figures central to the making of Sinhala nationalist ideology the book demonstrates authenticity’s rich and varied presence in Sri Lankan public life and its key role in understanding postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia and the world. It also explores how notions of authenticity shape certain strands of postcolonial criticism and offers a way of questioning the taken-for-granted nature of the nation as a unit of analysis but at the same time critically explore the deep imprint of nations and nationalisms on people's lives.

This is the first book-length study on how authors of color present themselves in public literary discourse. The book examines data including the case study authors' Twitter usage, and thereby the impact of the digital sphere in author self-presentation.

A New York Times bestseller A WASHINGTON POST “FEEL-GOOD BOOK guaranteed to lift your spirits” “A warm, charming tale about the rewards of revealing oneself, warts and all.” —People The story of a solitary green notebook that brings together six strangers and leads to unexpected friendship, and even love Clare Pooley's next book, Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting, is forthcoming Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren't really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes—in a plain, green journal—the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It's run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves—and soon find each other In Real Life at Monica's Café. The Authenticity Project's cast of characters—including Hazard, the charming addict who makes a vow to get sober; Alice, the fabulous mommy Instagrammer whose real life is a lot less perfect than it looks online; and their other new friends—is by turns quirky and funny, heartbreakingly sad and painfully true-to-life. It's a story about being brave and putting your real self forward—and finding out that it's not as scary as it seems. In fact, it looks a lot like happiness. The Authenticity Project is just the tonic for our times that readers are clamoring for—and one they will take to their hearts and read with unabashed pleasure.

This study, first published in 2000, examines the role of language as an instrument of empire in eighteenth-century British literature.

Winner of the 2016 ESSE Junior Scholar Book Award in Literatures in the English Language The Literature of Reconstruction argues for the term and concept of 'postmillennial reconstruction' to fill the gap left by the decline of postmodernism and deconstruction as useful cultural and literary categories. Wolfgang Funk shows how this notion emerges from the theoretical and philosophical development that led to the demise of postmodernism by relating it to the idea of 'authenticity': immediate experience that eludes direct representation. In addition, he provides a clear formal framework with which to identify and classify the features of 'reconstructive literature' by updating the narratological category of 'metafiction', originally established in the 1980s. Based on Werner Wolf's observation of a 'metareferential turn' in contemporary arts and media, he illustrates how the specific use of metareference results in a renegotiation of the specific patterns of literary communication and claims that this renegotiation can be profitably described with the concept of 'reconstruction'. To substantiate this claim, in the second half of the book Funk discusses narrative texts that illustrate this transition from postmodern deconstruction to postmillennial reconstruction. The analyses take in distinguished and prize-winning writers such as Dave Eggers, Julian Barnes, Jennifer Egan and Jasper Fforde. The broad scope of authors, featuring writers from the US as well as the UK, underlines the fact that the reconstructive tendencies and strategies Funk diagnoses are of universal significance for the intellectual and cultural self-image of the global North.

How do digital media technologies affect society and our lives? Through the cultural theory hypotheses of hyper-modernism, hyperreality, and posthumanism, Alan N. Shapiro investigates the social impact of Virtual/Augmented Reality, AI, social media platforms, robots, and the Brain-Computer Interface. His examination of concepts of Jean Baudrillard and Katherine Hayles, as well as films such as Blade Runner 2049, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina, and the TV series Black Mirror, suggests that the boundary between science fiction narratives and the »real world« has become indistinct. Science-fictional thinking should be advanced as a principal mode of knowledge for grasping the world and digitalization.

Individually and collectively, these essays establish a new direction for scholarship that examines the crucial activities of reading and writing about literature and how they relate to 'authenticity'. Though authenticity is a term deep in literary resonance and rich in philosophical complexity, its connotations relative to the study of literature have rarely been explored or exploited through detailed, critical examination of individual writers and their works. Here the notion of the authentic is recognised first and foremost as central to a range of literary and philosophical ways of thinking, particularly for nineteenth-century poets and novelists. Distinct from studies of literary fakes and forgeries, this collection focuses on authenticity as a central paradigm for approaching literature and its formation that bears on issues of authority, self-reliance, truth, originality, the valid and the real, and the genuine and inauthentic, whether applied to the self or others. Topics and authors include: the spiritual autobiographies of William Cowper and John Newton; Ruskin and travel writing; British Romantic women poets; William Wordsworth and P.B. Shelley; Robert Southey and Anna Seward; John Keats; Lord Byron; Elizabeth Gaskell; Henry David Thoreau; Henry Irving; and Joseph Conrad. The volume also includes a note on Professor Vincent Newey with a bibliography of his critical writings.

Authenticity is one of the major values of our time. It is visible everywhere, from clothing to food to self-help books. While it is such a prevalent phenomenon, it is also very evasive. This study analyses the 'culture of authenticity' as it relates to theatre and establishes a theoretical framework for analysis. Daniel Schulz argues that authenticity is sought out and marked by the individual and springs from a culture that is perceived as inherently fake and lacking depth. The study examines three types of performances that exemplify this structure of feeling: intimate theatre seen in Forced Entertainment productions such as Quizoola! (1996, 2015), as well as one-on-one performances, such as Oentroerend Goed's Internal (2009); immersive theatres as illustrated by Punchdrunk's shows The Masque of the Red Death (2007) and The Drowned Man (2013) which provide a visceral, sensate understanding for audiences; finally, the study scrutinises the popular category of documentary theatre through various examples such as Robin Soan's Talking to Terrorists (2005), David Hare's Stuff Happens (2004), Edmund Burke's Black Watch (2007) and Dennis Kelly's pseudo-documentary play Taking Care of Baby (2007). It is specifically the value of the document that lends such performances their truth-value and consequently their authenticity. The study analyses how the success of these disparate categories of performance can be explained through a common concern with notions of truth and authenticity. It argues that this hunger for authentic, unmediated experience is characteristic of a structure of feeling that has superseded postmodernism and that actively seeks to resignify artistic and cultural practices of the everyday.