The Confidence Game In American Literature

Author : Maria Konnikova
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143109871
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Confidence Game written by Maria Konnikova and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It’s a startling and disconcerting read that should make you think twice every time a friend of a friend offers you the opportunity of a lifetime.” —Erik Larson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and bestselling author of Devil in the White City Think you can’t get conned? Think again. The New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes explains how to spot the con before they spot you. “[An] excellent study of Con Artists, stories & the human need to believe” –Neil Gaiman, via Twitter A compelling investigation into the minds, motives, and methods of con artists—and the people who fall for their cons over and over again. While cheats and swindlers may be a dime a dozen, true conmen—the Bernie Madoffs, the Jim Bakkers, the Lance Armstrongs—are elegant, outsized personalities, artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust. How do they do it? Why are they successful? And what keeps us falling for it, over and over again? These are the questions that journalist and psychologist Maria Konnikova tackles in her mesmerizing new book. From multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes to small-time frauds, Konnikova pulls together a selection of fascinating stories to demonstrate what all cons share in common, drawing on scientific, dramatic, and psychological perspectives. Insightful and gripping, the book brings readers into the world of the con, examining the relationship between artist and victim. The Confidence Game asks not only why we believe con artists, but also examines the very act of believing and how our sense of truth can be manipulated by those around us.

Author : Warwick Wadlington
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400871646
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Confidence Game in American Literature written by Warwick Wadlington and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Warwick Wadlington
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Confidence Game in American Literature Warwick Wadlington written by Warwick Wadlington and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Gary H. Lindberg
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Confidence Man in American Literature written by Gary H. Lindberg and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1982 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Steven R. Serafin
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 9780826417770
Total Pages : 1340 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature written by Steven R. Serafin and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 1340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. A special feature is the topical article, of which there are 70.

Author : Mark R. Patterson
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 140085962X
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Authority, Autonomy, and Representation in American Literature, 1776-1865 written by Mark R. Patterson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, a familiar scene appears and reappears in American literature: a speaker stands before a crowd of men and women, attempting to mitigate their natural suspicions in order to form a body of federated wills. In this important study of the relationship of literature and politics, Mark Patterson argues that this scene restates political issues in literary terms and embodies the essential problems of American democracy facing both politicians and writers: What is autonomy? How does representation work? Where does true authority lie? Beginning with the debate over ratification of the United States Constitution, Patterson follows out the complex literary consequences of these questions. A work of literary history and criticism, this study also offers valuable insights into matters of political and literary theory. In separate chapters on Benjamin Frankin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown in the post-Revolutionary period and on Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, and Melville in the antebellum period, Patterson provides a series of brilliant readings of major texts in order to describe how American writers have conflated political and literary concerns as a means to their own social authority. Originally published in 1988. 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.

Author : Lara Langer Cohen
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812205197
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fabrication of American Literature written by Lara Langer Cohen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary histories typically celebrate the antebellum period as marking the triumphant emergence of American literature. But the period's readers and writers tell a different story: they derided literature as a fraud, an imposture, and a humbug, and they likened it to inflated currency, land bubbles, and quack medicine. Excavating a rich archive of magazine fiction, verse satires, comic almanacs, false slave narratives, minstrel song sheets, and early literary criticism, and revisiting such familiar figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Davy Crockett, Fanny Fern, and Herman Melville, Lara Langer Cohen uncovers the controversies over literary fraudulence that plagued these years and uses them to offer an ambitious rethinking of the antebellum print explosion. She traces the checkered fortunes of American literature from the rise of literary nationalism, which was beset by accusations of puffery, to the conversion of fraudulence from a national dilemma into a sorting mechanism that produced new racial, regional, and gender identities. Yet she also shows that even as fraudulence became a sign of marginality, some authors managed to turn their dubious reputations to account, making a virtue of their counterfeit status. This forgotten history, Cohen argues, presents a dramatically altered picture of American literature's role in antebellum culture, one in which its authority is far from assured, and its failures matter as much as its achievements.

Author : David H. Evans
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807134238
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition written by David H. Evans and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition, David H. Evans pairs the writings of America's most intellectually challenging modern novelist, William Faulkner, and the ideas of America's most revolutionary modern philosopher, William James. Though Faulkner was dubbed an idealist after World War II, Evans demonstrates that Faulkner's writing is deeply connected to the emergence of pragmatism as an intellectual doctrine and cultural force in the early twentieth century. Tracing pragmatism to its very roots, Evans examines the nineteenth-century confidence man of antebellum literature as the original practitioner of the pragmatic principle that a belief can give rise to its own objects. He casts this figure as the missing link between Faulkner and James, giving him new prominence in the prehistory of pragmatism. Moving on to Jamesian pragmatism, Evans contends that James's central innovation was his ability to define truth in narrative terms -- just as the confidence man did -- as something subjective and personal that continually shapes reality, rather than a set of static, unchanging facts. In subsequent chapters Evans offers detailed interpretations of three of Faulkner's most important novels, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet, revealing that Faulkner, too, saw truth as fluid. By avoiding conclusion and finality, these three novels embody the pragmatic belief that life and the world are unstable and constantly evolving. Absalom, Absalom! stages a conflict of historical discourses that -- much like the pragmatic concept of truth -- can never be ultimately resolved. Evans shows us how Faulkner explores the conventional and arbitrary status of racial identity in Go Down, Moses, in a way that is strikingly similar to James's criticism of the concept of identity in general. Finally, Evans reads The Hamlet, a work that is often used to support the idea that Faulkner is opposed to modernity, as a depiction of a distinctly pragmatic and modern world. With its creative coupling of James's philosophy and Faulkner's art, Evans's lively, engaging book makes a bold contribution to Faulkner studies and studies of southern literature.

Author : Herman Melville
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780810103252
Total Pages : 532 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Confidence-man written by Herman Melville and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Moby Dick Melville set out to write a "mighty book" on "a mighty theme." The editors of this critical text affirm that he succeeded. Nevertheless, their prolonged examination of the novel reveals textual flaws and anomalies that help to explain Melville's fears that his great work was in some ways a hash or a botch. A lengthy historical note also gives a fresh account of Melville's earlier literary career and his working conditions as he wrote; it also analyzes the book's contemporary reception and outlines how it finally achieved fame. Other sections review theories of the book's genesis, detail the circumstances of its publication, and present documents closely relating to the story. -- Amazon.com.

Author : Sarah Meer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192540610
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Claimants written by Sarah Meer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recovers a major nineteenth-century literary figure, the American Claimant. For over a century, claimants offered a compelling way to understand cultural difference across the Anglophone Atlantic, especially between Britain and the United States. They also formed a political talisman, invoked against slavery and segregation, or privileges of gender and class. Later, claimants were exported to South Africa, becoming the fictional form for explaining black students who acquired American degrees. American Claimants traces the figure back to lost-heir romance, and explores its uses. These encompassed real, imagined, and textual ideas of inheritance, for writers and editors, and also for missionaries, artists, and students. The claimant dramatized tensions between tradition and change, or questions of exclusion and power: it offered ways of seeing activism, education, sculpture, and dress. The premise for dozens of novels and plays, a trope, a joke, even the basis for real claims: claimants matter in theatre history and periodical studies, they touch on literary marketing and reprinting, and they illuminate some unexpected texts. These range from Our American Cousin to Bleak House, Little Lord Fauntleroy to Frederick Douglass' Paper; writers discussed include Frances Trollope, Julia Griffiths, Alexander Crummell, John Dube, James McCune Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain. The focus on claimants yields remarkable finds: new faces, fresh angles, a lost column, and a forgotten theatrical genre. It reveals the pervasiveness of this form, and its centrality in imagining cultural contact and exchange.