As the repressed text of literary studies, literary forgery constitutes an indispensable critique of those cultural practices that foster the so-called genuine article, and for reasons specified by social anthropologists. For like ‘pollution’ in Mary Douglas’ analysis of it in Purity and Danger (1966), or ‘rubbish’ in Michael Thompson's Rubbish Theory (1979), ‘spuriosity’ is a constitutive category in what Thompson calls in his subtitle ‘the creation and destruction of value’. This is why cultural theorists cannot afford to ignore it. Douglas expresses her key insight axiomatically: ‘where there is dirt there is system’. Since nothing is intrinsically dirty, ‘dirt’ is best understood as ‘matter out of place’, in the way that ‘weeds’ are vegetation out of place. In so far as ‘dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter’, what a society treats as dirt reveals implicitly what it values. Whether designed as an ‘archaeology of garbage’, like William Rathje and Cullen Murphy's Rubbish! (1994), or a ‘social history of trash’, like Susan Strasser's Waste and Want (1999), a comprehensive history of literary forgery would calibrate shifts in what corresponds to pollution behaviour and garbage guilt in the literary world. By doing so it would also reveal the fragility of both literature and ‘litter-ature’ as cultural categories.

Literary forgery is criticism by other means.