Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France

'Scott Carpenter takes his readers for a ride: under the guise of a lively and witty excursion through nineteenth-century literary frauds and hoaxes, he provides rich and subtle readings of political caricatures and texts by Mérimée, Balzac, Sand, Vidocq, and Baudelaire (his analyses of Baudelaire's prose poems are especially penetrating). Along the way, he explores issues in the nature and aesthetics of mystification that are at the heart of the literary enterprise itself.' Carol Rifelj, Middlebury College, USA ’Scott Carpenter est un lecteur très fin: il perçoit les nuances du texte, propose des rapprochements éclairants entre les différents ouvrages de Mérimée ainsi qu'entre ces ouvrages et la culture et l'histoire contemporaines. Non seulement il propose des interprétations originales et convaincantes de textes bien connus, mais s'attaque aussi à un problème que nous ont rendu familier les révélations d'innombrables impostures, tricheries et fraudes scandaleuses ou canulars comiques qui viennent de jalonner la dernière décennie.’ Cahiers Mérimée ’... a wealth of scholarship on a theme that would become, of course, even more relevant in the last decade of the century, which culminated in the momentous shams of the Dreyfus Affair.’ French Studies '... Carpenter draw outs some striking resemblances between the two emperors, and he provides a brilliant technical analysis of the work’s literariness, thereby establishing its status as a fake... The other chapters of the book are also highly successful, demonstrating the analytic power of Carpenter’s thesis and method of reading. By focusing on fraudulence as his analytic prism, Carpenter has accomplished two things: he has produced new insights about well-known texts while opening the canon to a range of lesser-known frauds. His point is not the banal one that we should expand the notion of text or literature to recuperate excluded texts for the sake of recuperat