This volume of presents an account of current thinking on central issues within and beyond the humanities. It brings together such leading figures as Sacvan Bercovitch and Helen Vendler, Anthony Appiah and Barbara Johnson, Seyla Benhabib and Norman Bryson, Martha Minow and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Marjorie Garber and Susan Suleiman. It explores such questions as: What is culture? What are cultures? Are literary texts and cultural texts different? What do literary and other fields engaged in cultural work have in common? What can literary studies profitably do with other disciplines? and What...

This collection of 11 essays by leading literary studies and cultural studies scholars examines the double meaning of the word forge - to create or to form, on the one hand, and to make falsely, on the other. The scholars take on a broad range of topics, including the falsified Hitler diaries, the creation of national identity in Bohemia, and Jean-Etienne Liotard's fraudulent Turkish identity. Each essay asks how forgery - at once the work of a criminal and a master - has shaped modern culture and challenged our understandings of authorship and value.