Skin game: Race and the confidence man in nineteenth-century American literature
Item
-
Title
-
Skin game: Race and the confidence man in nineteenth-century American literature
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:bf253e09d396:11533
-
identifier
-
12023
-
Creator
-
Robertson, Margaret S.,
-
Contributor
-
David S. Reynolds
-
Date
-
2012
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
American literature
-
Abstract
-
In the century and a half that has passed since the publication of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, the text has come to be regarded as the quintessential novel on the subject of confidence men and confidence games in mid-nineteenth-century America. Melville's confidence man, however, scarcely resembles the readily recognizable, fast-talking white flimflammer that twentieth- and twenty-first century readers have come to expect. By turns black or white, rich or poor, verbose or mute, greedy or charitable, Melville's confidence man---indeed, the true confidence man of the nineteenth century---proves a far more diverse and interesting subject. In this dissertation I argue that, for the most part, antebellum Americans did not make the same distinctions as modern scholars between white and black confidence men, but rather recognized them as players of the same game, a "skin game" in which actual skin had an important role to play. Evidence for this claim abounds: we find it in the discourse of the pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy, in the works of Melville and William Wells Brown, in the writings of proslavery novelists and public letters of abolitionists, and in the works of freemen and women, former slaves, and their descendants. These writers and thinkers were fascinated by the twin problems of race and confidence in equal measure, and were, moreover, inclined to equate these two problems with one another, a fact that has gone largely unexamined in literary scholarship. This dissertation strives to recover that lost connection and restore the confidence man to his rightful place at the heart of American racial discourse.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
English
