The Confidence Game in American Literature / / Warwick Wadlington.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton Legacy Lib. eBook Package 1931-1979
• VerfasserIn: Wadlington, Warwick,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2015]; ©1975
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Legacy Library ; 1688
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (346 p.)

Drawing on modern studies of rhetoric and the concept of the Trickster, the author examines Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Nathanael West as creators of a fictive experience centered in deceptive or problematic transactions of confidence.The model of a confidence game, suggested by the writers' own thematic preoccupations, permits an analysis of the social motivations inherent in the fiction. The author concentrates on the process by which confidence is established and the ways in which deception leads to regeneration and an altered perception of authority. His approach increases our understanding of the interrelation between the writer, his reader, and the world each envisions.Warwick Wadlington examines individual texts, as well as the pattern of each writer's total work. His book distinctively combines an enlarging archetypal frame with rhetorical analysis of the writer-reader imaginative act. Treated as different forms of a coherent mode of fictive experience, the works of these important authors illuminate each other. Professor Wadlington's method results in decisively new readings of each text and contributes to a phenomenology of reading three writers whose works represent crucial "moments" in the artist-audience negotiation of mutual faith.Originally published in 1975.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. Akin to Genesis -- PART ONE. Herman Melville: In Trust Nevertheless -- Introduction -- 2. Picaresque and Picturesque: Omoo, Typee, Mardi -- 3· Godly Gamesomeness: Self taste in Moby-Dick -- 4. Passion in Its Profoundest: Mardi Once More; Pierre and "Bartleby"; "Benito Cereno" -- 5. Hidden Suns and Phenomenal Men: The Confidence- Man, Billy Budd -- PART TWO. Mark Twain: The Authority of the Courtier -- Introduction -- 6. Idolatry Mad and Gentle: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It -- 7· River Courtship: "Old Times on The Mississippi" -- 8. But I Never Said Nothing: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- PART THREE. Nathanael West -- 9. Trick or Trash -- Coda -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- Backmatter