The story of a literary hoax; or, how Elizabeth Pepys came to be quoted on "turds that do fly"

A wonderful post by Whitney Anne Trettien, who examines the reception of a feminist spoof of Pepys famous diary, in order to explore the strange human desire to trust those who reveal shameful private failures. (That is, unless her whole blog is just another learned example of a literary spoof, and I'm being too trusting by quoting from her work without double-checking.)

This is fascinating. Not the literary hoax part, so much -- because I seriously doubt any historians of Restoration England were deceived -- but how the "fake" text travels through the authentic, the "real" history (the source texts), to prove a nonexistent past, and how that process reflects exactly what Dale Spender is doing in the fictional Diary. In some ways, this is the same trajectory that all texts take, feeding off a factual "before" to create an admittedly fictionalized "now" (skewed, biased -- we all admit what we do when we write, today), which then becomes the historical fodder for the future.

Actually, this is exactly what Samuel's Diary does, too. Perhaps best known for its entries on the Great Fire of London or the plague -- indeed, often used as a primary source text for these events -- the Diary recounts some of the most important events in British history; yet it falls far short of the documentary evidence historians might wish to have. In fact [pun intended, har har], the Diary ironically exposes how mediated the past is precisely because we expect a journal to be so unimpeachably "authentic," so far beyond the frustrating arguments over history as narrative, or the frames of interpretation that muddy up a text.