Fake It

In doing so he illuminates the process of artistic creation, which emerges as collaborative and imitative rather than individual and inspired, revealing that authorship is, to some degree, always forged.This project has taken me to places and times I never imagined I would investigate. As a specialist in modern and contemporary literature and film, I had no idea, when I began this endeavor, that I would be studying the works of a seventeenth-century female polymath or those of a poetic prodigy of the eighteenth century. But scholars must go where their research takes them, and I am delighted to have met Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Chatterton, as well as all the other writers, filmmakers, forgers, and frauds I’ve encountered in the course of writing this book. These explorations have provided the kind of rich material—fascinating stories, colorful characters, provocative intellectual conundrums—that would delight and inspire any writer.