Counterfeit Culture Truth and Authenticity in the American Prose Epic since 1960 Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Series

Counterfeit Culture explores the possibility of writing epic in an age of alternative facts. Examining six attempts to forge an American prose epic since 1960, this study goes on to trace a national tradition of inauthenticity, stretching back across four centuries. In works by authors such as Pynchon, Gaddis and Burroughs, the contemporary turn away from truth and authenticity can be seen as a return to an established line of literary tricksters and confidence men, with tropes of fraud and artifice running deep in the American grain. Combining archival work with historically-inflected analysis of literary narrative, this book ranges through questions of identity, technology, history, and music in its engagement. From Marguerite Young's inquiry into psychological disintegration to William T. Vollmann's ongoing cycle of false histories, the study introduces a new reading of the American epic.

Introduction: America and the 'way to the devil'; 1. Marguerite Young's flood of consciousness; 2. William Gaddis and the 'novel-writing-machine' of Andy Warhol; 3. 'Paper reality': William S. Burroughs and the cut-up method; 4. 'Bad history': Thomas Pynchon and the apocryphal epic; 5. 'History shambles on': William T. Vollmann and the Seven Dreams Cycle; Conclusion: 'every story has two tails'; Bibliography; Index.

Rob Turner is a Lecturer in twentieth and twenty-first-century Literature at the University of Exeter. He studied for his doctorate at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. His research is focused on American literature, with particular interests in the epic mode, and the poetics of hip-hop. He is a regular contributor to the Wire magazine.