Both sides in literary authenticity disputes demand author representativeness

Evidence

Yet the Brick Lane controversy illustrates the pitfalls of this approach, where both sides—Ali’s supporters and the protestors—expected the author to be “representative”: they simply disagreed about how well she discharged this duty. We may want to ponder the degree to which the interpretative expectations thrown up by realism in The Black Album and Brick Lane have operated to keep the texts and the critical responses to them fixated on matters of accuracy and authenticity at the expense of understanding the broader societal shift they mark. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 162

Categorization

• XREF: Shows critics and defenders converge on accuracy/authenticity, exactly the trap Morey wants an alternative to; usable as the foil in the Hamid–Naqvi argument.