Where fiction ends

Since Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction, critics have been put off author identity and its complications. This study tackles the concept of authorial identity anew, including it its consideration recent research in the social sciences and humanities, which despite the inflationary usage of „identity“ in many publication titles has so far been ignored. It attempts to grasp the border between textual „fiction“ and „reality“ at its most tangible: in cases of literary constructions of author identities and their exposure as fictional i. e. in so-called literary scandals. To facilitate comparison, the texts to which a newly forged theoretical groundwork is applied are uniformly 20th century cases and taken from Commonwealth literatures (Helen Demidenko/Darville, Sreten Bozic/B. Wongar and F. P. Greve/Grove). The Ern Malley Hoax is analysed as backdrop to differentiate such literary scandals from hoaxes.