BORDER CONTROL Faking Literature. By Ken Ruthven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Reviewed by Kylie O'Connell The recent Federal election saw both major parties speak of the 'need' for Australia to protect its National (and cultural) borders. The tropes of invasion, border protection and authentic identities are not of course confined to the political arena. Literature itself not only represents or reflects these issues in the story lines it creates, the actual issues also maintain themselves through their very structure as a legitimating system. Just as the people that the government aims to keep out reflects Australian's raced political process and the characteristics on which our National identity is based, literature maintains its cultural borders by rejecting those cultural texts and practices it finds threatening. Ken Ruthven's recently published Faking Literature analyses literary studies' lack of engagement with literary forgeries. He suggests that this is because these fakes expose the very spuriosity of all literature and that accordingly, in an effort to maintain its originality and authenticity, it casts these literary forgeries aside. Ruthven questions the borders around such literary institutions as literary studies, the literary awards system, and book reviewing. He suggests that literary forgeries are opportunities to reflect on the nature of society itself - that if we reject literary forgeries from our field of analysis because they are inherently unethical, 'we will never get beyond the banalities of recognition and denunciation.' Forgeries disrupt the very basis of literature and its structures of intelligibility. By merely exposing the fakes we simply reinforce the primacy of 'originals'. Literary studies should include the study of forgeries in its project and in doing so it would have to acknowledge that literature is produced through fields of intelligibility. This would then allow for the analysis of such fields and a logical progression toward the creation of new types of literature - although Ruthven's analysis does not contemplate this conclusion. Ruthven deconstructs the division between 'original' and 'fake' literature. Using postmodern theory he analyses the ways in which literature maintains its primacy as original artistry through the operation of authorship, authenticity, signature and autobiography. Literary institutions do not like texts that call their operations into question. Thus, even ficto-critical texts or those texts that question the boundaries of such institutions are criticised by the literary establishment. Admittedly this reader is not confronted with a huge range of ficto-critical texts when venturing into the local bookstore, but this does not mean that the borders between 'real' and 'fake' literature are patrolled that closely. Ruthven's citation of Brian Matthews' award winning Louisa is a poor choice since this was a text with much critical attention precisely because its construction questioned the borders between history, literature and biography. Ruthven may be over-valuing the power of the literary institutions to maintain their strict taxonomy of cultural assumptions. Indeed, one of the many unfortunate effects of incidents of literary forgery is that they diminish people's desire to engage in texts that question such forms of writing and in particular their relationship to identity. One should note that there are many reasons why literary forgeries, once exposed, are then ignored. For example, it may be that attention does not want to be given to the model of difference and identity on which the texts and the author's behaviour were ultimately based. While Ruthven's argument is a good one, it leaves this reader wanting to consider related issues about the complexity of representing raced and gender identity. Although Ruthven does make reference to the gendered nature of the signature and to receptions of cultural difference, he falls short of a complex analysis of these issues. The initial reception of these signatures and the subsequent denunciation of the texts once exposed as fraudulent are cynically reduced to 'politically correct responses' to the tyranny of identity politics. This reader's desire for a more detailed analysis of these issues is partly due to my being schooled in feminist literary scholarship which has considered many of these questions. Ruthven does refer to some of this more interdisciplinary work, but nonetheless contains his analysis to arguing with the established Literary (with a capital L) discipline. While not wanting to detract from the very good argument he makes about literature, Faking Literature is one text in an ongoing debate. Ruthven's suggestion that literary forgeries demand serious attention from cultural analysts infers he does not fully acknowledge or value the significant contributions made in this area by postmodern feminist cultural analysts (despite the early intensive reading that led to the first book on Australian feminist literary criticism). Ruthven may need to heed his own criticism about positing origins. Ruthven does provide one detailed analysis of what he insists is the key text for analysts of literary forgery, namely James Macpherson and his translations of Ossian texts. Ruthven calls this work 'Macphossian literature', indicating the controversy that surrounded Macpherson's 'translations' of these epic Scottish poems. Regardless of, or indeed because of this controversy, these texts became extremely popular and further translations were made in other languages. 'Macphossian literature' provides Ruthven with a model of how questions of history, authorship, translation and authenticity entwine with nationalism and the very establishment of literary institutions. A more detailed analysis of other examples of literary forgery would have enabled him to flesh out the very different ways in which these same categories - authorship, signature, authenticity and nationalism - enmesh themselves in the production of literature. The operation of these categories in the work of the 'first Aboriginal novelist' Mudrooroo and the creation of an Australian literary identity is very different to that which saw the establishment of the origins of a Gaelic poetic tradition. A more detailed analysis of significant literary forgeries, or the function of author identity (as in the case of Mudrooroo), is put aside in favour of a listing of different examples of literary forgery, fakes and farces. While this is in itself interesting it does not fully advance Ruthven's argument about the spuriosity of literature itself. Faking Literature does make a contribution to the ongoing debates surrounding writing, identity and difference. Ruthven's consideration does point out that these incidents in the world of literature are not to be ignored for they are a window onto our systems of signification and legitimacy. They provide insight into how literature (like politics) deceives us all. Kylie O'Connell is a researcher with the South Australian Police. She recently completed her Ph.D in Women's Studies, at the Flinders University of South Australia. Her research was on 'performative identity' and representations of identity and difference through literary forgeries' questionable identities.