Fan fic Fooey? Fooey

Just as a digression, I've always wondered whether those really do any good. A lot of books with such disclaimers contain charaters whose "resemblance to persons living or dead" is more than coincidental; and in the one case I've heard of in which an author was sued for libel and lost for her portrayal of a fictional character, I'd bet that the disclaimer was there.

I thought of that last one, but m/m seems to be a lot more popular than f/f.

Okay, "functionally" was not a very good choice of word (I'm not sure now why I used it). I agree that the narrators implicitly claim for their third-person sections equivalent facticity to the Narr's manuscript (or more so, since it's third-person, and occasionally shows us stuff the Narr apparently did not witness). What I was trying to say was that once we realize that the third-person sections do not have this status, the best way for us, the readers, to regard them is as a fiction. Whether or not you want to say the editors are lying depends upon how loosely you're willing to let them apply the term "re-created." (To return to the Biblical analogy for a second, I note that contemporary scholars are reluctant to say that the authors of apocryphal texts, or texts in the Bible believed not to be by their supposed authors, were lying or committing fraud in claiming false authorship. They usually take the stand that this was a convention of the time, to sign some holy person's name to your text as a way of claiming authority for it. To go even further afield, it occurs to me to wonder if there is any evidence that people of the time saw things that way--that the attributed author was merely a convention, making no claim about the real author.) --Adam *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

In my classical readings, I've come across references to pseudipigraphia which are outside of the Jewish and Christian traditions--much later works attributed to Virgil and suchlike. Heck, think of Plato--he wrote dozens of books which put his own thoughts in the mouth of Sophocles.

Yep. And the idea persists in the Christian tradition well beyond the time of the apostles: an excellent example being a set of works which were probably by a Syrian monk in the 5th or 6th century, but widely accepted for a long time as the work of Dionysius the Areopagite (a guy who Paul converted in Acts), and were so important in the development of theology that they're still in circulation (as the "work of Pseudo-Dionysius").

No. No way I'm touching this one. Uh-uh. --Dan'l *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

--- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com> wrote: ...

You could at least say "Socrates" safely. Jerry Friedman

I'm sure there are; but my question applies to these too. Did people of the time regard these attributions as merely a convention? Or were they fooled into thinking they were reading works by the real Virgil? Or, whether or not they were fooled, did they believe that the author meant them to think that these works were written by the real Virgil?

You mean Socrates, obviously. *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.