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    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
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The Confidence Game in American Literature

The Confidence Game in American Literature

Wadlington, Warwick

Hardcover

Series: Princeton Legacy Library, Book 1688

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0691644810
ISBN13: 9780691644813
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Apr 19 2016
Pages: 346
Weight: 1.45
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

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.

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