George Psalmanazar revisited
Made in Taiwan?: An Eighteenth-Century Frenchman’s Fictional Formosa by Benjamin Breen, The Appendix, Vol. 1, no. 4, October 2013.
This is a popular article with some impressive illustrations. Breen links Psalmanazar's fabrications to contemporaneous imaginary vojages of Jonathan Swift and others, including fictions passed off as fact, and to the ideological themes of the day. Apparently Psalmanazar "inspired" Swift. At the end, there is a reference to Jorge Luis Borges' story "Pierre Menard".
Breen also published a scholarly article:
Breen, Benjamin. "No Man Is an Island: Early Modern Globalization, Knowledge Networks, and George Psalmanazar’s Formosa," Journal of Early Modern History 17 (2013) 391-417.
From the abstract:
The divergence between Psalmanazar’s personal credibility and the longevity of his invented facts sheds light on the nature of evidence and information networks in early modern globalization. This episode highlights the imperfect and contested nature of early modern communication network.There is a fantastic computerized reconstruction of early modern knowledge networks:
Mapping the Republic of Letters: Electronic Enlightenment Correspondence Visualization
Keevak, Michael. The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004.
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