My book critiques Romantic ideas of authorship—for example, that a single creator is responsible for each work of art, and that art is primarily expressive—to argue instead that creation is usually collaborative and that great art can also be imitative (thesis 7). Chapter four particularly addresses the nature of authorship, incorporating Roland Barthes’s notion of “the death of the author” to analyze Percival Everett’s outrageous satire, Erasure (published in 2000). In this novel, a disgruntled Black novelist and Barthes theorist writes a savage parody exploiting stereotypes about Black males, only to see it become a best-seller and award-winner because nobody recognizes it as a parody! He then is forced to impersonate the “author,” one Stagg R. Leigh, and thus become one of the stereotypes he despises. This author doesn’t exactly die; he is recreated as someone else.Fake It also uses David Cowart’s concept of symbiotic texts (in which a second work “rewrites” an earlier work) to suggest that originals and copies always depend upon each other (thesis 1); I use this theory mostly in chapter three, which concerns the Ern Malley forgeries in WWII-era Australia (Malley was invented by two poet-soldiers) and Peter Carey’s novel My Life as a Fake, which fictionalizes the Malley fakes while also rewriting Frankenstein.In the fifth and sixth chapters, which discuss art forgery in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, and in Orson Welles’s film F for Fake, respectively, elucidate how capitalism and celebrity culture have transformed aesthetic values into economic values. In this chapter, I explain how forgeries challenge the “trace paradigm” that underwrites the art industry, according to which one can always find traces of a work’s origin in the work itself (thesis 10). A forgery serves as the dark double of the masterpiece: each one needs the other.The book also builds on important work by Nick Groom, K. K. Ruthven, Ian Haywood, Sándor Radnóti, Margaret Russett, Thierry Lenaine, and many others to mount a defense of forgery as a legitimate artistic practice.I arrived at this topic by way of economic literary criticism, a method of which I am one of the originators. I developed paradigms for economic criticism in my first book, The Economy of Ulysses (1995), and in two essay collections that I edited, The New Economic Criticism (1999; with Martha Woodmansee) and The Question of the Gift (2002). One chapter of my Joyce book deals with forgeries, as does a chapter in my later book, Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream (2013). I have long been fascinated by questions of originality and imitation (I’ve also published an essay about counterfeiting films), and by the clever liars and cheats who perpetrate forgeries and impostures. While writing Fake It, I enjoyed spending time with these colorful, crafty, though self-deluded characters.