Fake Identity? The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments9

Introduction11 Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schäfer

Faking It: Real Impostors and the Fabrication of Identities

The Message Becomes the Messenger: Jonathan Carver's Travels between Imposture and Nationalist Self-Fashioning27 Ramin Djahazi

'The Wish to be a Red Indian': The Canadian Dream of Grey Owl45 Caroline Rosenthal

The Curious Case of Asa Carter and The Education of Little Tree62 Laura Browder

The Impostor as Trickster as Innovator: A Re-Reading of Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan Cycle81 Stefan Löchle

Making the Fake: Fake Identities in Literature, Film, and TV

"You Do an Awfully Good Impression of Yourself": Authorial Impostors in Contemporary American Fiction99 Jan D. Kucharzewski

Reading Fiction under False Assumptions? Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins and her Posthumous Passing for Black111 Yulia Kozyrakis

Unwilling Impostors, Willing Victims: Passing in Two Nineteenth-Century Cuban Novels126 Victor Goldgel

From Rinehartism to Capgras: Imposture and the American Dream143 Christian Knirsch

Watch Me If You Can: The Return of the Impostor in Contemporary Film159 Wieland Schwanebeck

The Con Man and the Close-Up: Imposture in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood175 Martin Holtz

"A Man is Whatever Room He's in": Identity, Home, and Nostalgia in AMC's Mad Men190 Stefanie Mueller

AlterNatives?-A Coda

Identity Joyriding with the Trickster in Drew Hayden Taylor's Motorcycles & Sweetgrass211 Maryann Henck

Pretending to Be an Impostor 227 Drew Hayden Taylor