Obstacles to Solving “Shakespeare” and “Defoe” Mysteries: Spring 2020

by Anna Faktorovich, Lesly F. Massey (Contributor), Susie Gharib (Contributor)

This issue includes the first three articles based on Anna Faktorovich’s ground-breaking new computational-linguistics authorial-attribution method that she has applied to re-attributing over two-hundred texts in and near the “William Shakespeare” and “Daniel Defoe” canons. Scholars have been pitching theories regarding the true authors behind these famous texts since they were first published hundreds of years ago, and this new approach finally presents overwhelming proof of entirely new re-attributions. These pieces of the larger study explain the pitfalls in past biographical studies and literary theory that have prevented the quantitative and unbiased precision of this method. Biographies of “Daniel Defoe” have been heavily based on the biographers’ imaginings of what his life was like from hints seemingly left in his fictions. If “Defoe” did not write the texts attributed to this byline, the biographies fall apart for lack of evidence. Then, Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel is used as an example of the major blunders that negligent literary philosophers have been making without the due oversight. A review of the literature written by dozens of scholars since Rise’s publication demonstrates how a group of scholars have been inappropriately puffing each other’s contributions, while glazing over the unbridgeable faults in Watt’s basic conceptions of eighteenth-century novels that include those attributed to “Defoe”. And the third article explains the nature of Watt’s misunderstandings of the best and worst practices in literary composition, with a focus on the nature of authentic realism and the over-puffing of the hyper-formulaic rollercoaster novel structure. This collection also includes scholarly essays from Susie Gharib, Jason Holt and Lesly F. Massey. The book reviews from the Editor includes a section on vegan cookbooks, as well as on the latest scholarly releases. The short stories include three of Faktorovich’s fictions about romance scams, the risks faced by the community from the exaggerate methods taken to fight terrorist threats, and a retelling of Raskolnikov’s dilemma from his landlady’s perspective. There are also short stories by Marcus Berkemeier, Susie Gharib, Eric D. Goodman, Nancy Smith Harris, Hareendran Kallinkeel, and Ziaul Moid Khan, and poems by Christopher Barnes, Michael Ceraolo, John Henry Lloyd, Colin Dodds, Louis Gallo, Lloyd A. Jacobs, Douglas J. Lanzo, Rob Luke, Stan McCormick, Andy Oram, Mark Parsons, Timothy Robbins, and Howard Winn.

446 pages, Paperback

Published May 31, 2020

About the author

Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. She taught college English at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism. She published two academic books with McFarland: "Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson" (2013) and "The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels" (2014). Her British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization Series, https://anaphoraliterary.com/attribution changes world-history. She has been editing and writing for the independent, tri-annual Pennsylvania Literary Journal since 2009. And she started the second Anaphora periodical, Cinematic Codes Review, in 2016. She has presented her research at the MLA, SAMLA, EAPSU, SWWC, BWWC and many other conferences. She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and Brown University Military Collection fellowships.