The memoirs of James Frey and Margaret B. Jones (nee Margaret Seltzer) were both high-profile cases of belated revelation. While Frey's memoir of addiction and rehabilitation turned out to be embellished in crucial respects, Jones’, about gangland life, was ‘entirely fabricated’, in the words of the New York Times. Both memoirs are characterised by an imitative stylisation: that is, the reproduction of another's language. This is not ‘an artistic image of another's language’ in the sense of imitation of an individual voice or literary work, as in parody or plagiarism, but the ‘image’ of a genre: the literary addiction memoir in Frey's case, a gangland Bildungsroman in Jones’. These works are performances, in a sense that extends beyond the language of the memoirs to the acting out of an artificial author's biography, in interviews and publicity events; but they are concealed rather than openly acknowledged performances.

Unlike parody, these imitations do not register mockery or dissent from an original voice, but are acts of literary aspiration and incorporation. As Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson claim, works of plagiarism or forgery are presented to fit with the way that the ‘intended victims’, that is, its implied readers, perceive the original. This marks a difference from Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of stylisation, in which ‘the stylizer and his audience’ are united in their recognition and appreciation of the difference between the ‘contemporaneous’ and stylised language in a text. Thus, as Morson and Emerson argue, the ‘success of Ossian may be indicative of how Macpherson's contemporaries read Homer’, rather than offering either Macpherson's own view of Homer or a faithful appraisal of him. However, although ‘parody’ will not do as a label, since it relies on the reader's instant recognition of its judgemental imitation, neither do ‘plagiarism’ or ‘forgery’ exactly describe the literary activity of Macpherson, nor that of the two authors under discussion here, and elsewhere in this study.