Caroline Rosenthal & Stefanie Schäfer 
Fake Identity? 
The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture

Acknowledgments 9

Introduction 11 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-Fashioning 27 Ramin Djahazi

‚The Wish to be a Red Indian‘: The Canadian Dream of Grey Owl 45 Caroline Rosenthal

The Curious Case of Asa Carter and The Education of Little Tree 62 Laura Browder

The Impostor as Trickster as Innovator: A Re-Reading of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan Cycle 81 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 Fiction 99 Jan D. Kucharzewski

Reading Fiction under False Assumptions? Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins and her Posthumous Passing for Black 111 Yulia Kozyrakis

Unwilling Impostors, Willing Victims: Passing in Two Nineteenth-Century Cuban Novels 126 Victor Goldgel

From Rinehartism to Capgras: Imposture and the American Dream 143 Christian Knirsch

Watch Me If You Can: The Return of the Impostor in Contemporary Film 159 Wieland Schwanebeck

The Con Man and the Close-Up: Imposture in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood 175 Martin Holtz

‚A Man is Whatever Room He’s in‘: Identity, Home, and Nostalgia in AMC’s Mad Men 190 Stefanie Mueller

Alter Natives?-A Coda

Identity Joyriding with the Trickster in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles & Sweetgrass 211 Maryann Henck

Pretending to Be an Impostor 227 Drew Hayden Taylor

Contributors 231

Index 234